THAT which is known as the psyche or soul is something far beyond the reach of our senses. No one has ever seen or smelt, or heard or tasted or felt the psyche, or even a piece of it. There are two ways in which we can come on the track of the psyche. In my own innermost self I become aware of something which is not a tangible part of my physical body. This awareness of course is limited to a part of my own psyche. That of my brother is just as far beyond my direct reach as the psyche of the termite. I must accept the existence of other psyches because I am told of them. Introspection is thus one method by which I am able to affirm the existence of the psyche. But this is a separate branch of knowledge which at the moment does not concern us. Now we come to a question which will prove more interesting to us in regard to our observation of the termite. I will try again to be as little scientific and technical as possible. But I must enlarge on it and you must be patient and try to read it and understand it if you wish to grasp all the wonders of a termite nest, which will be revealed to you later on.
Remember that most of the important definitions which follow are my own and made on my own responsibility for what that may be worth. You will search scientific books in vain for confirmation of what I say. Nevertheless I flatter myself that, if you really study nature, not only will you find that all I say is true, but that it is the only key with which to unlock many dark secrets in the behaviour of living creatures.
Let us first see what science says. The psyche, so say scientific and very logical people, is a state, of matter. This was also their first definition of magnetism; you dare not say the psyche is something which causes a certain state of matter, for there is no proof of that. But the analogy with magnetism and later discoveries gives us a certain right to say:
First: 'The psyche is something outside the reach of our senses; it causes certain states in matter, which states are within the reach of our senses.'
It is of course only through movement that we can become aware of this state. Then comes the question, What is a psychological movement? Our whole life is a world of movement. We see dust and leaves blowing about in the wind; we see streams flowing and water plants swaying in it. We hear the wind and feel it; we see a little ant carrying a piece of food to its nest, we see an egg apparently unmoving, but if we have the chance of watching it long and carefully enough we see a continuous movement, which eventually results in a chicken. Which of all these movements are movements of the psyche and which are not? We need not dig too deeply into logic and metaphysics to find a definition. We will be practical and say: Only movement which has a definite motive can be a 'psychological movement'.
Secondly: Our own psyche is naturally the criterion which enables us to establish whether there is a motive or not.
Very logical people may not be satisfied with this part of our definition, but for the practical naturalist it is sufficient. Secondly we learn by experience that such movement occurs only in certain kinds of matter -- namely organic; that it mostly originates in the organism itself, and is not dependent on forces outside itself. I purposely say mostly because there are many motivations in nature which are really dependent on outside forces and yet are psychological movements. There is the case of the seed of what we call the 'flute' reed. Like a little powder-puff in shape the seed floats on the lightest breeze like a tiny airship, but as soon as it arrives over a pond or a marsh, the seed sinks to the ground like a bird settling on the water or damp ground. At first sight this appears to be a true psychological motive movement coming from within the seed, such as we very seldom find in the plant world. But on closer examination the explanation is merely this: through friction by the wind the little powder-puff, before it wrenches itself from the mother stem, receives a charge of negative electricity. The result is that all the fine hairs of the puff spring apart. As long as the hairs are spread open, the seed floats in the air; but as soon as it comes in touch with water vapour, the electricity is discharged and the puff folds up and slowly sinks to earth. By this means the plant makes certain not only that its seed shall be spread afar, but, what is of greater importance, that every seed will land on damp ground or actually in water. Here you have a number of objects which the plant achieves by utilizing natural forces outside of itself; nevertheless all these fall inside our definition as movements with a motive and therefore psychological.
Thirdly: Mostly -- but only mostly -- the movement originates in the organism itself.
The above definition will suffice for the practical naturalist. He will at times come across some puzzles, as for instance the pretended death of the toktokkie or the growth of a crystal; but after reflection he will find our definition still suffices.
A few words more about our classification of these motivated movements in nature and then we have finished this dry-as-dust topic and can continue with our termites. That all this has been very necessary you will see later.
I have classified it as follows:
Motivated movements in the plant world. These consist of four kinds:
(a) Growth (for instance the turning towards the light by plants).
(b) Tropism. Induced by outside influences.
(c) Movements dependent on natural forces outside the organism.
(d) Movements which appear to originate from within the organism, for instance the extension of tendrils towards near objects by certain creepers; this may also be a tropism.
Motivated movements in the lower animal world. The most common and most important are movements which originate in the organism itself, external forces of nature are used, but in a manner differing from that of the plants. The peculiarity of these movements is that they always follow a fixed course; the organism can never modify or change its behaviour; and this fixed behaviour is as much inherited as the organs of the body.
The investigator very soon comes to the conclusion that all motivated movements are dependent on what we call memory. These predetermined inherited motivated movements we call instinct. You come across this in all its original perfection in insects; and through the whole lower animal world you find it unchanged until you come to the apes and man and then only you find a vast and striking change in motivated movements, both in quality and in quantity.
Let us return again to the psychology of instinct. I said that the memory which constitutes this instinct is hereditary in the same way that the physical organs of the organism are hereditary. The following experiment which I myself carried out will explain what I mean.
The well-known yellow South African weaver bird, there are many kinds, but any kind may be used for this experiment, plaits a wonderful little nest at the extreme tip of a flexible branch, generally over water. You often see their nests at the end of the thin drooping twigs of the graceful weeping willow, but have you ever taken the trouble of watching to discover how the very first piece of grass is tied to the twig and what kind of knot the little bird uses? The full-grown bird is a seed eater, but the little ones are fed on worms until it is nearly time for them to leave the nest. Remember these two instinctive memories:
How to build the nest, and
How to feed the fledglings.
I hatched the eggs of the yellow weaver under canaries, for four generations. The new birds were forced to lay eggs each time without being able to build their characteristic nest. This is the most difficult part of the experiment, but it can be done. Every time these eggs were hatched under canaries, the young ones were fed on a synthetic diet and were never allowed to see a worm or an insect. Nor did they ever see a piece of grass which might be utilized for building. Then I took this fourth generation and provided them with everything which they would need in their normal environment. Remember now that for four generations they have not seen a plaited nest or tasted a worm. From personal experience the bird cannot possibly know what to do. There can be no question of individual memory. I expected at least that there would occur some deviation from normal behaviour, but it was not so. When the time arrived for nesting, the birds began plaiting vigorously. They made more nests than they required. This often happens in nature as a means of protection. The eggs were hatched and the young ones were fed on worms!
This experiment shows what I mean by the inherited memory of instinct.
The second characteristic of this psyche is that the individual is incapable of deviation from a certain fixed way of behaving, in other words he cannot acquire any individual causal memory. He is bound to his inherited memories. This inherited memory is in every respect a terrible tyrant. Even when death threatens there is no escape, if escape means behaviour contrary to the inherited memory.
I will give you two examples. The black 'road-maker' ants -- real ants this time, not termites -- are found in many parts of South Africa. They make footpaths, hundreds of yards long at times, along which they bear all kinds of plant and grass seed to their nest. At a distance you see two streams of these ants, one apparently white, the other black. The approaching ants each carry a white seed; the retreating ants carry nothing. The ant carries the seed in its husk down into the nest. Here the husk is carefully removed. The seed is stored, and the husk is deposited outside the nest in a heap. One kind of 'road-maker' ant is a master of a wonderful natural secret which even man has not discovered. It knows how to prevent the germination of seed, even when this is placed in damp ground in the dark. I think they must whisper an incantation which bewitches the seed. The microscope can discover not the least flaw in such seed, yet if you pick some of the same seed and place it in exactly the same spot where the ant places his, it germinates within a few hours. But there, just see how one is led astray involuntarily when one is dealing with ants! To come back to our subject. These 'roadmakers' are very much afraid of water. A flood is their greatest natural enemy. Do you know why? They were originally a desert ant, more or less modern emigrants to more privileged districts, therefore they have not yet learnt how to protect their subterranean nest against long continuous rains.
Deeply rooted in them therefore is the fear of this arch-enemy of their race. The only solution they have is flight -- early and as far as possible.
If you dig a little furrow across their path and fill it with water you cause the greatest bewilderment amongst the ants. On both sides of the furrow there congregates an excited throng and it takes them a very, very long while to discover that an easy solution would be to make a detour. Before they think of this, however, you place a grass stalk across the waterway to serve as a bridge and at once you will be enabled to watch very peculiar and mysterious behaviour. The ants begin to test the dangerous bridge. One by one, they try the bridge with their forelegs, stretching their bodies across it, while they cling to the bank with their back legs. They feel the bridge with their forelegs and antennae, then become aware of the water and hastily retreat to tell their companions that undoubtedly the bridge is quite unsafe. This is what happens on the bank which is on the same side as the nest, where the unladen ants congregate. On the other side of the bridge, the side farthest from the nest, the behaviour of the ants is quite different. The ants arrive here, each laden with a grass seed. Generally the seed is so heavy that the gait of the ant is very much impeded and difficult. What happens at the bridge? With apparently not the least hesitation each ant steps on to the straw with its gigantic burden. Sometimes it capsizes, but clings to the bridge with all its legs, and crosses. Always it succeeds in bringing its load to safety and hastens homewards to the nest as though nothing untoward had happened.
Here you are confronted by a riddle; the unladen ant is afraid to risk its life on the bridge; the laden ant crosses with a load which makes its passage a hundred times more dangerous. The carrying of the burden cannot lessen its awareness of the water. Now take a square piece of tin covered with earth and push it under the ants congregated on the nestward side of the bridge. When they are gathered thickly on the tin, pick this up with the ants. With a fine camel-hair brush mark as many ants as possible with a small red mark on the hinder part of the body, and then shake them on to the ground beyond the bridge. Immediately they all dash off along the path, to return shortly each carrying a grass seed, and they cross the bridge without a qualm, as if they had been crossing bridges all their lives. After a while some of your marked ants will return from the nest, having safely deposited the seed. When they come to the bridge they stop, and nothing you can do will give one single ant the courage to cross the bridge. And so you may continue from morning till night, if you have the patience of a naturalist, until almost every ant is marked with a red spot. In the end you will have learnt two things:
First, that you will never teach the ants by their own experience that the bridge can be crossed in safety. Secondly, you will never teach the ants that if the bridge is safe for a heavily laden ant it must be, proportional to the load, so much safer for an unladen ant. They prove this for themselves hundreds of times. If you were to continue this experiment for months, the ants would be able to prove this fact thousands of times, but their behaviour never changes, until at last you will give them up as hopeless. The unladen ant will never dare to cross the bridge, but as soon as he returns with his heavy burden, he crosses without hesitation.
Can you guess why the unladen ant refuses to cross and the laden ant does not? If you have investigated the psychology of animals, the behaviour of the ants will not remain a secret for very long. The behaviour of the unladen ant which leaves the nest is determined by only one instinctive urge -- to fetch food. In any case it is not a very strong urge, for it always operates in opposition to the ever-present and very great urge -- the homing instinct, the strongest of all psychological urges, except the sexual, where this is present in individuals. Higher up the scale of animal life we call this urge 'home-sickness', heimweh. The ants returning with the seed are drawn by two of the strongest urges:
Homing instinct, and
Bringing the food to safety.
It is as if you had tied threads to the ants and were pulling them. The thread pulling the ant away from the nest is very weak. When the ants become aware of danger and become afraid, the thread breaks. But the returning ants are drawn by two strong threads, which even a fear of death cannot break. We see therefore that the riddle was not such a very difficult one after all.
You understand now what the psychologist means when he says that the instinctive psyche cannot deviate from the inherited formula of behaviour, and that no individual can acquire a causal memory -- in other words he cannot learn by his own experience.
I also said that the psyche of inherited memories is a force which cannot be turned aside even by death if escape means behaviour which conflicts with the race memory. As an example of this I will tell you about the case of the springboks on the Springbokvlakte in Waterberg. This vlakte or plain is an island of open veld in the middle of the Transvaal bushveld. The springbok is highly specialized for life on the open plain, in other words all his inherited memory is of open plains. He knows how to escape the perils which threaten him there; he knows which is the best food for him there and how he can find this; he knows when and how to change his quarters. He can see and smell over great distances. On this plain there were, twenty years ago, thousands of springboks. Now they have been exterminated. Slowly but surely people have crowded there, made farms, fenced off camps, and destroyed the springboks. To the west rose the mountains and to the north lay the endless bushveld, where they would have been absolutely safe. Death lay on the one hand and safety on the other, but they could not take the step which would have saved them. Thousands of other big game, less specialized, fled into the bush and saved themselves from extinction. Often it happened that herds of springbok were chased by hunters into the bushveld. Always they returned -- sometimes the very same day -- to meet death on the open plain.
There still remain two further kinds of 'soul movements' or instinctive urges in nature, the classification and peculiarities of which you must know if you hope to understand even a little about the behaviour of the termite.
3. Group movements. There are some movements in individuals of a community which are determined by some purpose of benefit to the community. We term this phenomenon the 'group psyche or soul'. You find it in the termites, ants, baboons, apes, and in all animals which live in groups or are gregarious.
Then lastly:
4. The psyche of individual memory -- that is the psyche of the primate, man and the apes, baboons and monkeys.
When you live with baboons you very soon see that the difference between the psyche of the lowest baboon and the highest mammal (the dog or otter, for instance) is far greater than the difference between the psyche of the baboon and that of man.
What exactly is the difference? We know that the difference is there, but to put our meaning into words is diffficult at first. A great deal of very patient work was necessary to enable me to write down in black and white of what the difference consists.
If you ask scientists what the psychological difference is between a baboon and an otter, nine out of ten will say that the baboon possesses powers of reasoning and intelligence, which the otter lacks. It would be just as clear if they said the baboon is a baboon and the otter is an otter. Neither answer takes you very far. Another scientist may say that a baboon can learn new habits more easily than an otter. This is more enlightening but does not help us a great deal.
Let us look at this race memory carefully and see what the result of it is in nature. Let us take a land bird that can fly and is very much the same in every respect as other land birds. Gradually our bird begins finding food on the beach. After millions of years he learns to catch fish in fairly deep water. As soon as this becomes a fixed habit natural selection begins to operate. The deeper the bird goes into the water, the more chance he will have of survival if he is equipped for his new life physically and psychologically. And so it goes on for another million years. The bird loses his wings, they now serve as oars; he loses his feathers, which become down; his legs become adapted for swimming -- and at last we have the penguin. By the way, you will see I adhere to Darwin's theories: I never saw very much in those of De Vries. If we observe the penguin or the otter, for all that I have said applies to both, we notice several important facts. If any sudden change occurs in their environment, they are completely at sea. Let me give you an example of the otter in these conditions. Once in the Waterberg during a drought which lasted for four years and when all the streams became stagnant, you would find otters all over the veld adjacent to the big waterways. There were still pools of water, but these contained no fish or crabs. The otter is a nimble creature, and you can teach him to catch birds and other small land animals in the same way as a cat does. But he cannot teach himself to do this. Hundreds of these wild otters died in the midst of plenty. At this time I managed to get hold of a pair of newly born otters. One of these I sent to Springbokvlakte, thirty miles from the nearest running water. As he was dug out of the nest shortly after birth, he had never seen a river. A bitch reared him with her own litter. He never saw or was given food other than raw meat, birds and other land animals, and he never saw water except when it was given to him in a dish to quench his thirst.
At the same time I took a newly born baboon from the mountains to the plain and reared him with a feeding-bottle. Afterwards he was fed on food which was not his natural diet. No opportunity was given him of catching or eating a living insect. When both these animals were three years old they were taken for the first time to their own natural environments, the otter to Sterk river, whence he came originally, and the baboon to the Dubbele Mountains where his mother had been shot. Both were starved for a short while previously. Here I had a wonderful opportunity of observing the great difference in behaviour of these two creatures. The otter just hesitated for a moment or two, then plunged into the water, and within half an hour had caught a crab and a large carp and devoured them on the rocks.
The baboon, on the contrary, was completely lost. He was in the midst of a plenitude of natural food yet, although starving, he obviously knew nothing of turning over stones and catching the living insects which hide beneath them. There is no doubt he would have died of hunger if he had been left alone. When I turned up a stone for him, he retreated from the wriggling insects, and showed signs of fear and horror. With the greatest difficulty I succeeded in persuading him to taste a dead scorpion, from which I had removed the sting and the poison gland, and at last he was induced to catch a living one, with the result that he was immediately stung on the finger. He chose, amongst other things, to eat a wild mountain fruit which is deadly poison and his life perforce had to be saved. Such accidents never happen to wild baboons. They have learnt. Our tame baboon also eventually understood all these things, but he had to learn by painful experience.
We see then that nature has done two things for the baboon: she has given him a psyche which is able to acquire individual causal memories; and secondly she has done away with his inherited race memory. The baboon is the transition point in the animal world. He has advanced so far that in about fifty per cent of cases there is no inherited orientation of the sexual instinct, the instinct which is the strongest inherited instinct of all. In man we find no inherited orientation of this instinct at all. Sexual desire may awaken, but the orientation must be learnt in both sexes. How has this extraordinary change in natural behaviour taken place? In the first place some great advantage must accrue to the race through the change. You will understand that on the whole the result of inherited memory is to bind a race tyrannically to a special environment. The penguin to the sea, the klipspringer to the mountains, the springbok to the plains. The more perfect race memory is, the more strictly confined will be the organism to his environment. This is the only result of natural selection. The affirmation or belief that selection and development in nature are striving after some ideal state of perfection is childish and false. In every case of highly specialized animals we find a loss of physical perfection. An exchange always takes place and the result is not perfect. When the penguin exchanged his wings for oars, he did not become more perfect; the long neck of the giraffe is a disadvantage in flight and distinctly unsightly. Nature is not a charitable institution. She is always inimical to life, or else there would be no natural selection. It is clear, too, that the race which is bound too closely to a certain environment is at a great disadvantage. If the environment suffers a sudden change, such a race is lost. It cannot change to a new environment and individuals cannot acquire new memories to enable them to cope with the changes in their environment.
In Africa it frequently happens that whole races are exterminated by such changes in nature, as for instance droughts, locust, or the arrival of other unknown enemies. To give a race the great advantage of being able to change its environment suddenly, natural selection must cause a change in the very psyche. No single or even repeated somatic change only can bring this about. There must be psychological change, too. The first and most important step is to wipe out the inherited or race memory. Unless this happens there can be no change in environment. Not only must the race memory be destroyed, but even the possibility of its being inherited must disappear from the psyche -- or the change will be useless. Instead of race memory a psyche must be developed which enables every individual to acquire his own causal memory of his environment. It is this change in the baboons which has given them an advantage which everyone who is familiar with them will concede.
The immediate result of this change was to make the baboon a citizen of the world. He can adapt himself to any environment -- that is why we find our South African baboons in most varying surroundings. You find them on the fruitful mountains of the Cape, in the big forests and river valleys of the interior, and in the waterless deserts of the Kalahari. In every environment he acquired new habits. He learnt to catch sucking lambs and tear them open in order to drink the milk in their bellies -- throughout half of South Africa. In the Northern Transvaal he has not learnt this yet. In one district on Waterberg he has learnt to place a hard fruit on a rock and break it open with a stone -- his first use of an implement. Nowhere in nature will you find these things happening except in the baboons and apes.
From all this investigation we find two facts which are clear as daylight. First there is a vast psychological gulf between the psyche of the baboon and the psyche of the highest mammal below the race of primates; and secondly that the psyche of man and the psyche of the baboon are exactly the same in quality. The difference is found to be only in quantity.
In the case of the baboon we are looking at the stream near its source in the mountains. In the case of man we see the same river just before it disappears into the ocean.
Man has gone farthest in this direction, and that is the reason why he has conquered the biggest and driest deserts, the Gobi and the Sahara, the highest mountains, the deepest valleys, the tropics and the frozen Poles -- and yet survived. But nature demands payment for all she gives. As we have shown there is always an exchange. The baboon and man paid an exorbitant price for their new type of psyche -- a price which is bound surely but slowly to bring about their natural extermination. One day, when I have finished telling you about the termites, I may tell you why I think that.
Only one more word about the psyche of the individual causal memory. The old animal psyche of race memory does not actually get destroyed, but it is paralysed by a kind of permanent inhibition. But it still remains and can be artificially stimulated into function. This, I think, is the greatest discovery I made during an observation of the wild baboon lasting over three years. There is not the least doubt to my mind that the so-called subconscious psyche of man is not a wonderful creation of natural selection which leads to ideal perfection, but is in fact only the old animal psyche in a state of inhibition, and which in abnormal circumstances is released and leads to serious psychological disorders.
We have gone a tremendous detour, but now at last we have reached the point where, with a clear conscience, we can investigate the communal psyche of the termite.
Friday, May 15, 2009
The Soul of the White Ant Chapter 3
3. Language in the Insect World
I HAVE told you how, shortly after she discards her wings, the flying queen sends a signal into the air, which is always answered by the appearance of a male flying through the air. What exactly the signal was I did not make clear, but left it for some later opportunity. I want to talk about it now. But I am afraid there will be a long preface before I begin -- perhaps the preface may take even this whole chapter. The inquisitive reader need not be disappointed, however, for I am sure this preface will prove interesting, too. In order to understand the language of animals, one must first of all learn its A B C, but of far more importance are the things you must unlearn. We will therefore begin at the very beginning.
An individual member of any animal race which wishes to communicate with another at a distance can use one of three things; colour, scent or sound. And at this point you must begin unlearning. If you think of colour and scent and sound in terms of the impression which these make on a human being, then you will be lost before you begin your journey. Listen. There is one kind of termite which constantly signals by means of sounds. If ever you have slept in a house in which those termites are at work you will know the sound well. It is a quick tik-tik-tik. You can also hear this if you let down a microphone through a hole made into a termitary. You will easily observe that not only do the termites make this noise, but that other termites at a distance hear it and immediately react to it by their behaviour.
Now catch one or more of the signallers and examine their anatomy under the microscope. What do you find? Not the least sign or suggestion of any kind of auditory organ; not even the most primitive kind of ear; not a single nerve that could possibly be sensitive to what we call sound. We find the same as regards colour and scent. The termites undoubtedly use both colour and scent as a means of signalling -- as you will see later. But again you seek in vain for any organ resembling an eye. There is not even the faintest spot of pigment which might serve as a primitive eye. The termites are quite blind, yet sensitive to an indirect ray of light far below the threshold of perception of the human eye. By this I mean they can become aware of a very diffuse light not shining directly on them, which a human eye could not perceive. This can be proved by experiment. As to any organ of smell, that, too, seems to be completely absent.
Let us now observe another insect, our dear little toktokkie beetle, which will take us a good way along the path we must travel, and will greatly help to explain the secret to us. If you wish to learn to know the toktokkie really well and to learn to talk his language, you must tame him. He must become so used to your presence that he never alters his behaviour by suddenly becoming aware of being observed. He is very easy to tame, at least the gray-bellied one is, and learns to know his master and love him -- you know the one I mean, the smooth little fellow with pale legs, not the rough-backed one. What South African child has never seen the toktokkie and heard him make his knock? Your eye suddenly falls on him in the road or beside it. If he does not get a fright and fall down dead with stiff legs as dead as the deadest toktokkie which ever lived -- then you see him knock, and of course hear him, too. He looks round for some hard object, a piece of earth or a stone, and knocks against it with the last segment of his body -- three, four, four, three! This is his Morse Code. He then listens for a moment or two, turning rapidly in many directions. His behaviour is ridiculously human. His whole body becomes an animated question mark. You can almost hear him saying:
'I'm positive I heard her knock! Where can she be? There, I hear it again!'
He answers with three hard knocks, and then he betakes himself off in great haste and runs a yard or two. He then repeats the signal in order to get a further true direction, and so he continues until at last he arrives at his loved one's side.
Female termites after shedding their wings
If you study the behaviour of many toktokkies during the mating season, you will occasionally have to follow one for an incredible distance in the direction of the answering signal. He can hear the signal over a distance which makes the sound absolutely imperceptible to the human ear. It is at this stage that he begins to rouse the interest of the psychologist. We study him at closer quarters. Again we find under the microscope no sign of an ear, nor complex or nerve which takes the place of an organ of hearing. But in spite of this we still think of the behaviour of the toktokkie in terms of sound and hearing!
Now we will go into our laboratory with our tame toktokkies. The laboratory is a stretch of natural veld or a fairly large garden. The observer will soon discover that the toktokkie is one of the most credulous of insects. When he is dominated by sexual desire, he will believe everything you happen to tell him. Knock on a stone with your fingernail in his own Morse Code -- and at once he answers. You can teach him quite easily never to knock except in answer to your signal. This you succeed in doing by not knocking for several days unless he has become perfectly quiet. After a day or two he will have learnt to knock only in answer to your signal and will answer immediately. Now get a small microphone with headpiece and three feet of wire (you will find this indispensable in your association with the insect world). The microphone must be so powerful that you are able to hear the footfall of a fly quite easily. When your toktokkie is tame and well trained you proceed to test the acuteness of his perceptions. To your amazement you find that they are unbelievably, supernaturally fine. Knock on the stone again with your finger-nail and gradually make the sound softer until it is quite beyond your own hearing. Still the toktokkie answers the signal at once without the least sign of doubt. Then begin knocking not with the nail but with the soft pulp of the finger. There seems to be no sound at all, but still the toktokkie answers! Now take the microphone and place it on the ground with the earphones over your ears. Knock on the receiver with the pulp of your finger -- a real knock, not merely a pressure. With a little practice you can reduce the sound until at last it is inaudible even through the microphone, but still the toktokkie hears it!
The solution to this problem is: It is not sound as such which the toktokkie becomes aware of, and there can be no question of hearing it. Any book of physiology will make it clear to you that sound is only our interpretation of certain vibrations in the atmosphere. (Sound cannot travel through a vacuum -- you can prove this by sending a sound through a wire inserted in the cork of a thermos flask. It will be imperceptible, except for a faint noise which escapes through the cork.) It is our ear which interprets the vibrations as sound. Beyond the ear the universe is soundless. Without an ear -- or organ of hearing -- there can be no sound. But the vibrations which we call sound have a physical function. It is by the exercise of physical force that the drum of the ear and the hammer and anvil bones of the inner ear are set into vibration. In the same way you can let grains of sand or a thin gas-flame vibrate to a musical note. But there is another difficulty. The sudden meeting of the surfaces of two physical bodies can result in vibrations of the mysterious ether, which are not by any means sound-waves and therefore have no effect at all on our ears. We are getting into somewhat deep water now. I believe it is vibrations of this kind, waves in the ether, of which the ants and the toktokkie make use. It may sound far-fetched, but you will have to accept some such explanation if you wish to learn the language of insects. The next time you hear a 'longbreath locust' (apparently so called because it is not a locust and the sound is not made by its breath), you must not think of sound or hearing -- you must think of vibrations -- waves in the ether -- which can be sensed by another such locust at a distance of at least eight miles. You will also have to use this theory when we return to our termite nest, or else you will be forced to think of a miracle in order to explain the communication which takes place between the outlying sections of the nest. This disposes of sound in the insect world. There are two other ways of communication which I must tell you about: Scent and Colour.
A queen termite full of eggs with two soldier termites
Our termites continually make use of scents, some of which we can perceive with our olfactory organ. In the Northern Transvaal there is a well-known termite known as the 'stinking ant'; this emits a foul smell to a distance of three or four yards, which has the peculiar property of causing extreme nausea in most people and also in dogs. Then again all South Africans will know the characteristic smell of the common termite. This is caused by the discharge of a gas which the termite uses for other purposes. It is of the utmost importance for us in our study of termite language to make certain of what the signal of the queen really consists. After long study, I have come to the conclusion that it consists of something which would affect our senses as scent if it were strong enough. Things always seem pretty hopeless in the beginning when we are dealing with phenomena which lie far beyond all our senses, but 'perseverance pays' must be the motto of the traveller along these dark and unknown footpaths.
Here is another reason for thinking the signal may be thought of as scent. You can easily train a pointer to track down the flying termites after they have lost their wings. He will track down a signalling queen for nearly a hundred yards against the wind; with the male he finds it difficult even over the distance of a yard.
But a still more important proof will take me longer to explain. The following are all the signals used by the termite:
The communaI signal which is constantly sent out by the queen -- who forms the hub of the nest. This serves to keep the community together and enables every termite to recognize every other member of the community. It is a signal which cannot be perceived by our senses.
The call of the workers and soldiers. This is perceived by us as sound.
Food messages. (Beyond our perception.) These three we will examine more closely later on.
Lastly, the sexual signal of the queen, which is also beyond the reach of our senses.
We know that throughout nature scent and colour are used as sexuals. If there are no brilliant colours, you may be sure there will be some scent.
Allow me to digress for a moment. I have shown you how the termite flight is the key by which the door to the sexual life is unlocked. Without flight there can be no sexual life. In the mammals the key is generally scent, sometimes allied to colour. This begins in the plant. The colour and perfume of flowers is of course purely a sexual phenomenon. The apes and humans have long ago lost both. But in the other mammals scent still remains as the key which makes sexual life possible -- that is why it is possible to keep large mammals for years in a zoo or menagerie without the sexual passion being awakened. It is interesting to study our African kudus in relation to this fact. In the Waterberg I very often had the opportunity of watching from near at hand a wonderful spectacle. For a week or two every year the kudu cows become scented or 'on heat'. As soon as this passes the bulls leave the cows and segregate themselves to graze in small herds. Of course they come in contact with the cows occasionally but never evince the slightest interest. But just see what happens when the cows, in heat again, travel four or five miles to windward. A minute before all the bulls were grazing peacefully, in sleepy careless fashion. Then they get the wind. It is as if a thunderbolt has fallen in their midst. With fitful movements the beautiful heads are raised and their nostrils are snuffing the wind greedily. Their deafening bellows are heard on all sides, and immediately the whole herd, which a moment before was grazing so peacefully, is lost in a cloud of dust and we hear only the clashing of horns and bellowing of rage, because the sexual life is always preceded by the stimulation of the fighting sense. Without the special scent from the cows, their sexuality would have remained unstimulated. This can be easily proved. Take one of the smaller mammals, of a kind dependent on the sense of smell, and destroy the olfactory nerves by incision; in some cases nature does this with an ulcer. After this the male may be brought into the closest contact with the female, even in heat, but never again will he become sexually stimulated. Outside stimulation, scent or colour, is always essential to stir the sex centres. The only animals whose sex centres can be stirred without this outside stimulation are the higher apes and man. When you come to the ape and man the cultivation of scent and colour becomes fascinating and mysterious. Ask a young woman why she uses the heavenly perfumes which the chemist of our day has learnt the art of producing in such exquisite perfection. Her answer will be misleading, because she does not know the subconscious reason. It is an urge which rises from the most remote recesses of her psyche, a rudimentary and forgotten instinct from the ancient history of her race. She would be startled if she heard the true story of this urge. She would feel embarrassed if she learnt that the basis of all her perfumes were the sexual secretions of several kinds of cats, of deer, and (the most expensive of all) the rudimentary sexual material secreted by a certain kind of whale which is now merely a pathological reminder of his life on the land millions of years ago. Musk is the universal basis of the scent sex signals in animals. Even in human beings this phenomenon may still be found. Our young woman will be astonished and perhaps a little envious, to hear that about one woman in every thousand still secretes musk on occasion. Her whole skin becomes strongly and exquisitely fragrant. As in the case with many such atavistic tendencies of our race history, this secretion of musk is found more frequently in individuals of the monkey or ape tribes. But that is the origin of the mysterious yearning which lovely perfumes awaken in the human being.
When speaking of scent you should again think of waves in the ether. It is false to assume that perfumes consist of gases or microscopic substances. Perfume itself is not entirely a physical substance. You may scent a large room for ten years with a small piece of musk and yet there will not be any loss in weight.
We appear to have gone a very long way round in order to find out of what the signal of our queen really consisted. In reality we avoided many deviations in the path which we might have taken. That shows us how very patient and persevering we must be to reveal the tiniest little secret of our dear Mother Nature. Now at least we are nearly certain -- never of course quite certain -- that the sexual signal of the termite queen is a wave circle in the ether which in all probability would be perceived by our olfactory nerves as perfume if it could cross the threshold of perceptivity of our senses.
I HAVE told you how, shortly after she discards her wings, the flying queen sends a signal into the air, which is always answered by the appearance of a male flying through the air. What exactly the signal was I did not make clear, but left it for some later opportunity. I want to talk about it now. But I am afraid there will be a long preface before I begin -- perhaps the preface may take even this whole chapter. The inquisitive reader need not be disappointed, however, for I am sure this preface will prove interesting, too. In order to understand the language of animals, one must first of all learn its A B C, but of far more importance are the things you must unlearn. We will therefore begin at the very beginning.
An individual member of any animal race which wishes to communicate with another at a distance can use one of three things; colour, scent or sound. And at this point you must begin unlearning. If you think of colour and scent and sound in terms of the impression which these make on a human being, then you will be lost before you begin your journey. Listen. There is one kind of termite which constantly signals by means of sounds. If ever you have slept in a house in which those termites are at work you will know the sound well. It is a quick tik-tik-tik. You can also hear this if you let down a microphone through a hole made into a termitary. You will easily observe that not only do the termites make this noise, but that other termites at a distance hear it and immediately react to it by their behaviour.
Now catch one or more of the signallers and examine their anatomy under the microscope. What do you find? Not the least sign or suggestion of any kind of auditory organ; not even the most primitive kind of ear; not a single nerve that could possibly be sensitive to what we call sound. We find the same as regards colour and scent. The termites undoubtedly use both colour and scent as a means of signalling -- as you will see later. But again you seek in vain for any organ resembling an eye. There is not even the faintest spot of pigment which might serve as a primitive eye. The termites are quite blind, yet sensitive to an indirect ray of light far below the threshold of perception of the human eye. By this I mean they can become aware of a very diffuse light not shining directly on them, which a human eye could not perceive. This can be proved by experiment. As to any organ of smell, that, too, seems to be completely absent.
Let us now observe another insect, our dear little toktokkie beetle, which will take us a good way along the path we must travel, and will greatly help to explain the secret to us. If you wish to learn to know the toktokkie really well and to learn to talk his language, you must tame him. He must become so used to your presence that he never alters his behaviour by suddenly becoming aware of being observed. He is very easy to tame, at least the gray-bellied one is, and learns to know his master and love him -- you know the one I mean, the smooth little fellow with pale legs, not the rough-backed one. What South African child has never seen the toktokkie and heard him make his knock? Your eye suddenly falls on him in the road or beside it. If he does not get a fright and fall down dead with stiff legs as dead as the deadest toktokkie which ever lived -- then you see him knock, and of course hear him, too. He looks round for some hard object, a piece of earth or a stone, and knocks against it with the last segment of his body -- three, four, four, three! This is his Morse Code. He then listens for a moment or two, turning rapidly in many directions. His behaviour is ridiculously human. His whole body becomes an animated question mark. You can almost hear him saying:
'I'm positive I heard her knock! Where can she be? There, I hear it again!'
He answers with three hard knocks, and then he betakes himself off in great haste and runs a yard or two. He then repeats the signal in order to get a further true direction, and so he continues until at last he arrives at his loved one's side.
Female termites after shedding their wings
If you study the behaviour of many toktokkies during the mating season, you will occasionally have to follow one for an incredible distance in the direction of the answering signal. He can hear the signal over a distance which makes the sound absolutely imperceptible to the human ear. It is at this stage that he begins to rouse the interest of the psychologist. We study him at closer quarters. Again we find under the microscope no sign of an ear, nor complex or nerve which takes the place of an organ of hearing. But in spite of this we still think of the behaviour of the toktokkie in terms of sound and hearing!
Now we will go into our laboratory with our tame toktokkies. The laboratory is a stretch of natural veld or a fairly large garden. The observer will soon discover that the toktokkie is one of the most credulous of insects. When he is dominated by sexual desire, he will believe everything you happen to tell him. Knock on a stone with your fingernail in his own Morse Code -- and at once he answers. You can teach him quite easily never to knock except in answer to your signal. This you succeed in doing by not knocking for several days unless he has become perfectly quiet. After a day or two he will have learnt to knock only in answer to your signal and will answer immediately. Now get a small microphone with headpiece and three feet of wire (you will find this indispensable in your association with the insect world). The microphone must be so powerful that you are able to hear the footfall of a fly quite easily. When your toktokkie is tame and well trained you proceed to test the acuteness of his perceptions. To your amazement you find that they are unbelievably, supernaturally fine. Knock on the stone again with your finger-nail and gradually make the sound softer until it is quite beyond your own hearing. Still the toktokkie answers the signal at once without the least sign of doubt. Then begin knocking not with the nail but with the soft pulp of the finger. There seems to be no sound at all, but still the toktokkie answers! Now take the microphone and place it on the ground with the earphones over your ears. Knock on the receiver with the pulp of your finger -- a real knock, not merely a pressure. With a little practice you can reduce the sound until at last it is inaudible even through the microphone, but still the toktokkie hears it!
The solution to this problem is: It is not sound as such which the toktokkie becomes aware of, and there can be no question of hearing it. Any book of physiology will make it clear to you that sound is only our interpretation of certain vibrations in the atmosphere. (Sound cannot travel through a vacuum -- you can prove this by sending a sound through a wire inserted in the cork of a thermos flask. It will be imperceptible, except for a faint noise which escapes through the cork.) It is our ear which interprets the vibrations as sound. Beyond the ear the universe is soundless. Without an ear -- or organ of hearing -- there can be no sound. But the vibrations which we call sound have a physical function. It is by the exercise of physical force that the drum of the ear and the hammer and anvil bones of the inner ear are set into vibration. In the same way you can let grains of sand or a thin gas-flame vibrate to a musical note. But there is another difficulty. The sudden meeting of the surfaces of two physical bodies can result in vibrations of the mysterious ether, which are not by any means sound-waves and therefore have no effect at all on our ears. We are getting into somewhat deep water now. I believe it is vibrations of this kind, waves in the ether, of which the ants and the toktokkie make use. It may sound far-fetched, but you will have to accept some such explanation if you wish to learn the language of insects. The next time you hear a 'longbreath locust' (apparently so called because it is not a locust and the sound is not made by its breath), you must not think of sound or hearing -- you must think of vibrations -- waves in the ether -- which can be sensed by another such locust at a distance of at least eight miles. You will also have to use this theory when we return to our termite nest, or else you will be forced to think of a miracle in order to explain the communication which takes place between the outlying sections of the nest. This disposes of sound in the insect world. There are two other ways of communication which I must tell you about: Scent and Colour.
A queen termite full of eggs with two soldier termites
Our termites continually make use of scents, some of which we can perceive with our olfactory organ. In the Northern Transvaal there is a well-known termite known as the 'stinking ant'; this emits a foul smell to a distance of three or four yards, which has the peculiar property of causing extreme nausea in most people and also in dogs. Then again all South Africans will know the characteristic smell of the common termite. This is caused by the discharge of a gas which the termite uses for other purposes. It is of the utmost importance for us in our study of termite language to make certain of what the signal of the queen really consists. After long study, I have come to the conclusion that it consists of something which would affect our senses as scent if it were strong enough. Things always seem pretty hopeless in the beginning when we are dealing with phenomena which lie far beyond all our senses, but 'perseverance pays' must be the motto of the traveller along these dark and unknown footpaths.
Here is another reason for thinking the signal may be thought of as scent. You can easily train a pointer to track down the flying termites after they have lost their wings. He will track down a signalling queen for nearly a hundred yards against the wind; with the male he finds it difficult even over the distance of a yard.
But a still more important proof will take me longer to explain. The following are all the signals used by the termite:
The communaI signal which is constantly sent out by the queen -- who forms the hub of the nest. This serves to keep the community together and enables every termite to recognize every other member of the community. It is a signal which cannot be perceived by our senses.
The call of the workers and soldiers. This is perceived by us as sound.
Food messages. (Beyond our perception.) These three we will examine more closely later on.
Lastly, the sexual signal of the queen, which is also beyond the reach of our senses.
We know that throughout nature scent and colour are used as sexuals. If there are no brilliant colours, you may be sure there will be some scent.
Allow me to digress for a moment. I have shown you how the termite flight is the key by which the door to the sexual life is unlocked. Without flight there can be no sexual life. In the mammals the key is generally scent, sometimes allied to colour. This begins in the plant. The colour and perfume of flowers is of course purely a sexual phenomenon. The apes and humans have long ago lost both. But in the other mammals scent still remains as the key which makes sexual life possible -- that is why it is possible to keep large mammals for years in a zoo or menagerie without the sexual passion being awakened. It is interesting to study our African kudus in relation to this fact. In the Waterberg I very often had the opportunity of watching from near at hand a wonderful spectacle. For a week or two every year the kudu cows become scented or 'on heat'. As soon as this passes the bulls leave the cows and segregate themselves to graze in small herds. Of course they come in contact with the cows occasionally but never evince the slightest interest. But just see what happens when the cows, in heat again, travel four or five miles to windward. A minute before all the bulls were grazing peacefully, in sleepy careless fashion. Then they get the wind. It is as if a thunderbolt has fallen in their midst. With fitful movements the beautiful heads are raised and their nostrils are snuffing the wind greedily. Their deafening bellows are heard on all sides, and immediately the whole herd, which a moment before was grazing so peacefully, is lost in a cloud of dust and we hear only the clashing of horns and bellowing of rage, because the sexual life is always preceded by the stimulation of the fighting sense. Without the special scent from the cows, their sexuality would have remained unstimulated. This can be easily proved. Take one of the smaller mammals, of a kind dependent on the sense of smell, and destroy the olfactory nerves by incision; in some cases nature does this with an ulcer. After this the male may be brought into the closest contact with the female, even in heat, but never again will he become sexually stimulated. Outside stimulation, scent or colour, is always essential to stir the sex centres. The only animals whose sex centres can be stirred without this outside stimulation are the higher apes and man. When you come to the ape and man the cultivation of scent and colour becomes fascinating and mysterious. Ask a young woman why she uses the heavenly perfumes which the chemist of our day has learnt the art of producing in such exquisite perfection. Her answer will be misleading, because she does not know the subconscious reason. It is an urge which rises from the most remote recesses of her psyche, a rudimentary and forgotten instinct from the ancient history of her race. She would be startled if she heard the true story of this urge. She would feel embarrassed if she learnt that the basis of all her perfumes were the sexual secretions of several kinds of cats, of deer, and (the most expensive of all) the rudimentary sexual material secreted by a certain kind of whale which is now merely a pathological reminder of his life on the land millions of years ago. Musk is the universal basis of the scent sex signals in animals. Even in human beings this phenomenon may still be found. Our young woman will be astonished and perhaps a little envious, to hear that about one woman in every thousand still secretes musk on occasion. Her whole skin becomes strongly and exquisitely fragrant. As in the case with many such atavistic tendencies of our race history, this secretion of musk is found more frequently in individuals of the monkey or ape tribes. But that is the origin of the mysterious yearning which lovely perfumes awaken in the human being.
When speaking of scent you should again think of waves in the ether. It is false to assume that perfumes consist of gases or microscopic substances. Perfume itself is not entirely a physical substance. You may scent a large room for ten years with a small piece of musk and yet there will not be any loss in weight.
We appear to have gone a very long way round in order to find out of what the signal of our queen really consisted. In reality we avoided many deviations in the path which we might have taken. That shows us how very patient and persevering we must be to reveal the tiniest little secret of our dear Mother Nature. Now at least we are nearly certain -- never of course quite certain -- that the sexual signal of the termite queen is a wave circle in the ether which in all probability would be perceived by our olfactory nerves as perfume if it could cross the threshold of perceptivity of our senses.
The Soul of the White Ant Chapter 1 & 2
1. The Beginning of a Termitary
SOME years ago an article about 'White Ants', as termites are commonly but incorrectly called, appeared in a South African journal. Almost everything that naturalists tell us about these insects is important and interesting, and Dr Hesse's article was exceptionally so. But the article also made another fact clear; how very little is done in our land to study the behaviour of animals, and how much has been done and is being done in other countries. Everything that Dr Hesse told us was the result of long and patient observation in America and Europe. None of his facts was exactly relevant to our South African termites.
The life-history of most of our South African ants and termites is in every respect just as wonderful and interesting as anything that has been discovered in South America. Over a period of ten years I studied the habits of termites in an investigation into animal psychology. I then realized that such observation reveals new wonders every day. To mention one instance, the functioning of the community or group psyche of the termitary is just as wonderful and mysterious to a human being, with a very different kind of psyche, as telepathy or other functions of the human mind which border on the supernatural.
When one wishes to write of all these wonders, one is bewildered by the embarras de richesses. It is hard to know where to begin.
I want to tell you about the commonest of our termites or 'white ants', and what I am going to relate may be observed by anyone who wishes; he may even discover new wonders. Most of these facts have not been published before; indeed, I do not think they have been discovered by scientists.
The common termite which is so destructive to wood of all kinds, and builds 'ant-hills' or termitaries on the open veld, is known throughout South Africa. I will tell you a little about the beginning of its community life.
The beginning of a termitary dates from the moment when the termites fly, after rain and usually at dusk, in order to escape their innumerable enemies. Even here we see a remarkable instance of the wonder of instinct. The termites beginning their thrilling flight know nothing about enemies. They have never been outside the nest before. The peril of existence is to them a closed book, and yet nine times out of ten they do not fly until the birds are safely in their nests.
These flying termites are at least twenty times as big as the others of the nest, and quite different in colour and form. You must consider a termitary as a single animal, whose organs have not yet been fused together as in a human being. Some of the termites form the mouth and digestive system; others take the place of weapons of defence like claws or horns; others form the generative organs. These flying termites are the generative organs of the colony. Every one of these winged insects is a potential king or queen. The four beautiful wings have taken months to develop and grow to perfection; months elapse -- or even years in very dry districts -- before an opportunity for flight occurs. They will never fly until there has been rain, and the reason is obvious. After the flight they must seek immediate shelter in the ground, and when the ground is hard and dry this is impossible.
Soldier and worker termites
Follow the flight of the termites carefully from the moment they emerge from the nest. They crawl out of a little opening, thousand upon thousand. There is obviously much excitement in the termitary. Sometimes the flyers are escorted to the opening by workers and soldiers. The first impulse of the flying insect as it emerges is to try its wings. It flutters and essays to lift itself into the air. If it fails, it climbs a grass stalk and takes off from this height. But fly it must, even if it is only for a few inches. You will understand presently why this is so essential, just as necessary as the preservation of its life, and therefore it takes just as much trouble to fly -- even more perhaps, for the urge is greater -- as to protect itself from enemies.
The watcher will soon become aware that the object of the flight seems to be to spread the insects over as large an area as possible, as some plants disseminate their seed. Some of the termites rise high into the air and travel for miles before they settle; others sink to the ground only a stride or two from the old nest. But far or near, fly they must, or the sole object of their existence is frustrated.
Let us watch one of the ants which has flown and settled in the grass near at hand. We will suppose it is female -- the two sexes cannot be distinguished with the naked eye. The first thing she does is to discard her wings. This she succeeds in doing by a lightning-like movement -- so fast that we cannot follow it with the eye. One moment we see her with her wings intact, the next moment she steps away, and her four wings are lying on the grass -- she is much, much quicker than a woman who discards her evening gown and hangs it over a chair. It took months for her wings to grow. For years perhaps she has lived in subterranean darkness, in preparation for this one moment. For a period of three seconds, for a distance of perhaps three yards, she enjoyed the exquisite thrill of flight and with that the object of a great preparation has been furfilled and the fairy-like wings are flung aside like a worn-out garment.
Immediately the wings are discarded she walks about rapidly for a few seconds. You become aware that she is seeking a suitable place for some further purpose -- but you do not know what the purpose can be, and her immediate behaviour does not clear things up for you. You must watch patiently if you wish to discover what she intends doing. When she has found a suitable spot, she does a very peculiar thing. She comes to rest on her fore-feet and lifts three-quarters of the hinder part of her body into the air, and she remains stationary in this position, as still as if she were merely the statue of a termite. If you become impatient and walk away the secret of the flying termite will remain a secret to you for ever. What is she doing? She is busy sending a wireless SOS into the air. Be patient a little longer -- there are only very few people who have witnessed this miracle. What does the signal consist of? I think I know, but I doubt if you will guess what it is. Only if you have made a study of the signals of insects will you find the clue. You think, of course, of some sound which cannot be heard by the human ear. You may know how our little South African toktokkie beetle (a beetle of the genus Psammodes) knocks in similar circumstances. No, the termite's signal is not a sound. One can prove that by experiment. We will content ourselves for the moment with the fact that the signal consists of something far and away beyond our own senses, and yet the male becomes aware of it over incredible distances! How does this happen? Well, it does happen, and our female is a very modern young woman, not too shy to make the first move in love-making. If you wait long enough you will presently see another termite come flying through the air, and you will notice that although his flight appears awkward and almost involuntary, yet he can steer a course and choose a direction even against the wind. The male sinks to the ground sometimes a yard or two from the place where the female is standing motionless in her curious posture. As soon as he lands he makes the same lightning-like movement which we have already seen in the female, and there on the ground lie his wings, too. His haste is terrible and irresistible. Over and through the grass he crawls, so fast that we can barely follow him with our eyes. He is looking for the originator of the signal which he received high up in the air. Within a few minutes he has found her. She has been motionless all the while, with her body hoisted aloft, but the instant the male touches her with his antennae, he infects her with his own excitement. She begins to run away as fast as her legs will carry her, and immediately behind her comes the male. They are now beginning the final search -- they are house-hunting, and this the male leaves to his wife. It must be a good house, for they will live in it for a long time. And with the finding of their home and the digging of the front door we will leave the happy pair for a while.
There are even stranger things connected with this little drama, of which the inexperienced observer will not become aware. I spoke of the urge to flight. Listen carefully. If those two termites had not flown, none of the events we have watched would have occurred. Instinct is something which only works step by step. If you destroy one step or omit it, then the whole thing collapses. Nature wishes the 'white ant' to spread. If the nests are too close together it would be bad for the communities, therefore they receive wings and must fly. But flight is only one step in their sexual life; if this step is omitted, their sexual life and their very existence ends there and then.
For as long as two years the two sexes may live in the same nest after they have grown wings. They are in constant touch with each other but there is not the least evidence of any sexual life. They must crawl out of the nest, they must fly, must settle and lose their wings, then and then only, and then immediately, sexual life begins. If you prevent them flying and break off the wings, both male and female die without any further attempt to become progenitors of the race. The length and distance of the flight is of no importance; it may last hours or only a second; it may cover miles or only an inch. But the force which we call instinct commands -- you must pass through every stage, you must take every step, or you are doomed. If you take a male and female just as they are emerging from the nest and place them beside each other, even in the closest contact, you notice that they take not the least interest in each other. They struggle to get away from each other. Let the female fly a few inches and the whole process which we described is carried out to a finish. Let the male circle round even once, then force him to land near the female, then and then alone, will events take their normal course. A second in time, three inches in space, one flutter of wings, are to the termite a gulf as wide as infinity dividing two kinds of existence. To us it may appear only a small dividing line, but the insect may not overstep it, not even with human assistance.
2. Unsolved Secrets
THERE is much to be told about the building of the termitary, but I wil1 confine myself to behaviour which is important for purposes of comparison. All behaviour is of importance to the psychologist. Behaviour is psychology -- at least it is all of the psyche we know or can study. For purposes of comparison, for comparative psychology -- especially if you begin at the top of the ladder with the apes -- the field at our disposal is not very large.
Upon the king and queen themselves falls the task of feeding and attending the first children. After the latter are fullgrown they take upon themselves all the work of the community. In the meantime the queen grows larger and fatter by the hour. Her small neat body vanishes in increasing layers of fat until at last it becomes an unsightly wormlike bag of adiposity. And to heighten the tragedy, her mate, in addition to having the blessing of almost the only dolce far niente existence known to nature, appears to have discovered the secret of eternal youth. He remains as beautiful and active and young as he was on his wedding flight. But if you look at her, an immovable disgusting worm, it seems impossible to believe that she ever fluttered in the air on fairy wings. We could hardly blame his majesty if he began casting an eye at some other female a little less repellent. If you fear this, however, you will be pleasantly surprised. His attachment to his queen seems to keep pace with her own growth. If you lay open the palace cavity, he rushes round in consternation, but always returns to her side. There is no question of saving his own life in flight. He clings to her gigantic body and tries to defend it, and if the ruthless attacker so wills, he dies at her side. What a wonderful example of married love and fidelity, which can survive this terrible change of his beloved to a loathsome mass of fat!
We often speak metaphorically of a queen as the mother of her people. This the termite queen is literally. She is the only mother of the millions which form the community; every individual is born out of her. Naturally she is absolved from all duty in the nursery. All she is expected to do is to keep on laying an endless stream of eggs, because the daily loss of workers and soldiers is enormous, notwithstanding their excellent methods of defence. Mother Nature is not perturbed about the death of a thousand individuals, when she has had the foresight to make certain of an unending supply.
I am now coming to a stage when in actuality every termitary differs in its growth, but for our purpose we will suppose that the environment of our nest has been such that development is entirely normal and not subjected to any disturbing outside influences. The first workers begin to build a palace for the queen. Deep below the surface of the earth, from three to six feet, they prepare a hollow chamber. As years go by this is gradually increased in size, and the earth which is excavated is taken to the surface and used to form the thick defensive crust. In this hollow chamber the queen is placed. It fits her so well that one is inclined to think that it has been built around her. I do not think this actually happens, but now I come to a stage when almost every conclusion is bound to be mere guesswork. No human eye has ever seen what actually takes place. No one has ever discovered a way in which to watch the termites at work in the queen's chamber, for they work in pitch darkness and to let light into the chamber is as great a handicap to the termites as the sudden destruction of the sun would be to us. We cannot see in complete darkness.
Winged adult termites
The queen continues growing until, compared with the ordinary termite, she reaches a gigantic size, and becomes an immobile mass, still as a log. The only part of her which gives any sign of life is the little head, which remains unchanged. If you dissect the skin and body carefully and examine it under a microscope, you will be convinced that during her later stages of growth the queen is unable to make any voluntary movement, except of course of the head. You make think she could move like some worms do, by contraction and expansion. But you will find that no part of the body behind the head can be controlled by what was once an intricate central nervous system. Nor do I think that there can be any question of her regaining the power of movement temporarily, as for instance by emptying the sac for a while. I certainly have seen no indication of this. Besides, the very nerves in the body have changed into fluid. Both these theories, therefore, that the queen is able to move by contraction and expansion, or that she gains a temporary power of movement, must be discarded.
To continue with the queen's life-history, her first palace is a cell made of termite earth which rapidly becomes as hard as cement. Usually she just neatly fits into it. She is always much too huge to use the door of the cell as entrance or exit. If you wish to remove her you must break down the cell. The king and the workers, however, can come and go quite easily. She is fed and the eggs which she never ceases laying are removed to the breeding grounds by workers appointed to this task. The king apparently does nothing. He appears to be a mere hanger-on in the palace. Still the queen goes on growing. Here in her first palace- she has not attained one-third of her eventual size. At last she very nearly fills all the available space in the cell. There is barely room for the tiny workers to carry the eggs away across the insensate bulk. A terrible tragedy appears to be imminent -- it reminds us of the question: what will happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable mass? The human observer is helpless at the threat of this terrible fate. In spite of all his knowledge and intelligence he is unable to help in any way. But actually termites have never worried about it at all. They had a solution ready -- a very simple one. Just before her majesty finally outgrows her cell they build a second one, half as big again as the first. It is parallel and adjacent to the first, just as hard and with just such a narrow door. The queen is then removed and placed in the second cell where there is space for her to grow for perhaps another year. So she gets transposed from cell to cell until there have been about six changes with the queen in the last and biggest. The chamber doors are always equally small much too small for the queen to come or go by.
We must clearly establish another fact which makes the whole matter even more complicated. One could easily prove by measurement that the queen's subjects could not possibly move her. The lifting power of one termite can be estimated fairly closely, and the area of the queen's body available for workers to grasp during lifting can be measured. During the later stages it would need thousands more termites to lift her than there is available grasping space for the body.
We present to you the following facts:
The queen is incapable of movement.
The doors of the cell are too small for her to come or go by.
The insects cannot lift her.
Yet she vanishes from one cell to appear in another.
The only explanation that seems feasible is that there are several queens and that it is not the same one each time. If the first gets too big for her cell, she is killed and eaten and then the workers carry a potential queen into the second cell where she develops into a queen. The only intelligent explanation, perhaps, and very simple, now we have thought of it.
The only pity is that it is not true. We have been deceived by the analogy of the bees, which make queens, kill, and move them. It is quite an easy matter to mark the termite queen and so prove that it is the same queen which gets moved. I have tested many theories brought forward by friends who have studied entomology, but have never found one which coincided with all the facts. Perhaps one day a future Fabre will discover the truth.
SOME years ago an article about 'White Ants', as termites are commonly but incorrectly called, appeared in a South African journal. Almost everything that naturalists tell us about these insects is important and interesting, and Dr Hesse's article was exceptionally so. But the article also made another fact clear; how very little is done in our land to study the behaviour of animals, and how much has been done and is being done in other countries. Everything that Dr Hesse told us was the result of long and patient observation in America and Europe. None of his facts was exactly relevant to our South African termites.
The life-history of most of our South African ants and termites is in every respect just as wonderful and interesting as anything that has been discovered in South America. Over a period of ten years I studied the habits of termites in an investigation into animal psychology. I then realized that such observation reveals new wonders every day. To mention one instance, the functioning of the community or group psyche of the termitary is just as wonderful and mysterious to a human being, with a very different kind of psyche, as telepathy or other functions of the human mind which border on the supernatural.
When one wishes to write of all these wonders, one is bewildered by the embarras de richesses. It is hard to know where to begin.
I want to tell you about the commonest of our termites or 'white ants', and what I am going to relate may be observed by anyone who wishes; he may even discover new wonders. Most of these facts have not been published before; indeed, I do not think they have been discovered by scientists.
The common termite which is so destructive to wood of all kinds, and builds 'ant-hills' or termitaries on the open veld, is known throughout South Africa. I will tell you a little about the beginning of its community life.
The beginning of a termitary dates from the moment when the termites fly, after rain and usually at dusk, in order to escape their innumerable enemies. Even here we see a remarkable instance of the wonder of instinct. The termites beginning their thrilling flight know nothing about enemies. They have never been outside the nest before. The peril of existence is to them a closed book, and yet nine times out of ten they do not fly until the birds are safely in their nests.
These flying termites are at least twenty times as big as the others of the nest, and quite different in colour and form. You must consider a termitary as a single animal, whose organs have not yet been fused together as in a human being. Some of the termites form the mouth and digestive system; others take the place of weapons of defence like claws or horns; others form the generative organs. These flying termites are the generative organs of the colony. Every one of these winged insects is a potential king or queen. The four beautiful wings have taken months to develop and grow to perfection; months elapse -- or even years in very dry districts -- before an opportunity for flight occurs. They will never fly until there has been rain, and the reason is obvious. After the flight they must seek immediate shelter in the ground, and when the ground is hard and dry this is impossible.
Soldier and worker termites
Follow the flight of the termites carefully from the moment they emerge from the nest. They crawl out of a little opening, thousand upon thousand. There is obviously much excitement in the termitary. Sometimes the flyers are escorted to the opening by workers and soldiers. The first impulse of the flying insect as it emerges is to try its wings. It flutters and essays to lift itself into the air. If it fails, it climbs a grass stalk and takes off from this height. But fly it must, even if it is only for a few inches. You will understand presently why this is so essential, just as necessary as the preservation of its life, and therefore it takes just as much trouble to fly -- even more perhaps, for the urge is greater -- as to protect itself from enemies.
The watcher will soon become aware that the object of the flight seems to be to spread the insects over as large an area as possible, as some plants disseminate their seed. Some of the termites rise high into the air and travel for miles before they settle; others sink to the ground only a stride or two from the old nest. But far or near, fly they must, or the sole object of their existence is frustrated.
Let us watch one of the ants which has flown and settled in the grass near at hand. We will suppose it is female -- the two sexes cannot be distinguished with the naked eye. The first thing she does is to discard her wings. This she succeeds in doing by a lightning-like movement -- so fast that we cannot follow it with the eye. One moment we see her with her wings intact, the next moment she steps away, and her four wings are lying on the grass -- she is much, much quicker than a woman who discards her evening gown and hangs it over a chair. It took months for her wings to grow. For years perhaps she has lived in subterranean darkness, in preparation for this one moment. For a period of three seconds, for a distance of perhaps three yards, she enjoyed the exquisite thrill of flight and with that the object of a great preparation has been furfilled and the fairy-like wings are flung aside like a worn-out garment.
Immediately the wings are discarded she walks about rapidly for a few seconds. You become aware that she is seeking a suitable place for some further purpose -- but you do not know what the purpose can be, and her immediate behaviour does not clear things up for you. You must watch patiently if you wish to discover what she intends doing. When she has found a suitable spot, she does a very peculiar thing. She comes to rest on her fore-feet and lifts three-quarters of the hinder part of her body into the air, and she remains stationary in this position, as still as if she were merely the statue of a termite. If you become impatient and walk away the secret of the flying termite will remain a secret to you for ever. What is she doing? She is busy sending a wireless SOS into the air. Be patient a little longer -- there are only very few people who have witnessed this miracle. What does the signal consist of? I think I know, but I doubt if you will guess what it is. Only if you have made a study of the signals of insects will you find the clue. You think, of course, of some sound which cannot be heard by the human ear. You may know how our little South African toktokkie beetle (a beetle of the genus Psammodes) knocks in similar circumstances. No, the termite's signal is not a sound. One can prove that by experiment. We will content ourselves for the moment with the fact that the signal consists of something far and away beyond our own senses, and yet the male becomes aware of it over incredible distances! How does this happen? Well, it does happen, and our female is a very modern young woman, not too shy to make the first move in love-making. If you wait long enough you will presently see another termite come flying through the air, and you will notice that although his flight appears awkward and almost involuntary, yet he can steer a course and choose a direction even against the wind. The male sinks to the ground sometimes a yard or two from the place where the female is standing motionless in her curious posture. As soon as he lands he makes the same lightning-like movement which we have already seen in the female, and there on the ground lie his wings, too. His haste is terrible and irresistible. Over and through the grass he crawls, so fast that we can barely follow him with our eyes. He is looking for the originator of the signal which he received high up in the air. Within a few minutes he has found her. She has been motionless all the while, with her body hoisted aloft, but the instant the male touches her with his antennae, he infects her with his own excitement. She begins to run away as fast as her legs will carry her, and immediately behind her comes the male. They are now beginning the final search -- they are house-hunting, and this the male leaves to his wife. It must be a good house, for they will live in it for a long time. And with the finding of their home and the digging of the front door we will leave the happy pair for a while.
There are even stranger things connected with this little drama, of which the inexperienced observer will not become aware. I spoke of the urge to flight. Listen carefully. If those two termites had not flown, none of the events we have watched would have occurred. Instinct is something which only works step by step. If you destroy one step or omit it, then the whole thing collapses. Nature wishes the 'white ant' to spread. If the nests are too close together it would be bad for the communities, therefore they receive wings and must fly. But flight is only one step in their sexual life; if this step is omitted, their sexual life and their very existence ends there and then.
For as long as two years the two sexes may live in the same nest after they have grown wings. They are in constant touch with each other but there is not the least evidence of any sexual life. They must crawl out of the nest, they must fly, must settle and lose their wings, then and then only, and then immediately, sexual life begins. If you prevent them flying and break off the wings, both male and female die without any further attempt to become progenitors of the race. The length and distance of the flight is of no importance; it may last hours or only a second; it may cover miles or only an inch. But the force which we call instinct commands -- you must pass through every stage, you must take every step, or you are doomed. If you take a male and female just as they are emerging from the nest and place them beside each other, even in the closest contact, you notice that they take not the least interest in each other. They struggle to get away from each other. Let the female fly a few inches and the whole process which we described is carried out to a finish. Let the male circle round even once, then force him to land near the female, then and then alone, will events take their normal course. A second in time, three inches in space, one flutter of wings, are to the termite a gulf as wide as infinity dividing two kinds of existence. To us it may appear only a small dividing line, but the insect may not overstep it, not even with human assistance.
2. Unsolved Secrets
THERE is much to be told about the building of the termitary, but I wil1 confine myself to behaviour which is important for purposes of comparison. All behaviour is of importance to the psychologist. Behaviour is psychology -- at least it is all of the psyche we know or can study. For purposes of comparison, for comparative psychology -- especially if you begin at the top of the ladder with the apes -- the field at our disposal is not very large.
Upon the king and queen themselves falls the task of feeding and attending the first children. After the latter are fullgrown they take upon themselves all the work of the community. In the meantime the queen grows larger and fatter by the hour. Her small neat body vanishes in increasing layers of fat until at last it becomes an unsightly wormlike bag of adiposity. And to heighten the tragedy, her mate, in addition to having the blessing of almost the only dolce far niente existence known to nature, appears to have discovered the secret of eternal youth. He remains as beautiful and active and young as he was on his wedding flight. But if you look at her, an immovable disgusting worm, it seems impossible to believe that she ever fluttered in the air on fairy wings. We could hardly blame his majesty if he began casting an eye at some other female a little less repellent. If you fear this, however, you will be pleasantly surprised. His attachment to his queen seems to keep pace with her own growth. If you lay open the palace cavity, he rushes round in consternation, but always returns to her side. There is no question of saving his own life in flight. He clings to her gigantic body and tries to defend it, and if the ruthless attacker so wills, he dies at her side. What a wonderful example of married love and fidelity, which can survive this terrible change of his beloved to a loathsome mass of fat!
We often speak metaphorically of a queen as the mother of her people. This the termite queen is literally. She is the only mother of the millions which form the community; every individual is born out of her. Naturally she is absolved from all duty in the nursery. All she is expected to do is to keep on laying an endless stream of eggs, because the daily loss of workers and soldiers is enormous, notwithstanding their excellent methods of defence. Mother Nature is not perturbed about the death of a thousand individuals, when she has had the foresight to make certain of an unending supply.
I am now coming to a stage when in actuality every termitary differs in its growth, but for our purpose we will suppose that the environment of our nest has been such that development is entirely normal and not subjected to any disturbing outside influences. The first workers begin to build a palace for the queen. Deep below the surface of the earth, from three to six feet, they prepare a hollow chamber. As years go by this is gradually increased in size, and the earth which is excavated is taken to the surface and used to form the thick defensive crust. In this hollow chamber the queen is placed. It fits her so well that one is inclined to think that it has been built around her. I do not think this actually happens, but now I come to a stage when almost every conclusion is bound to be mere guesswork. No human eye has ever seen what actually takes place. No one has ever discovered a way in which to watch the termites at work in the queen's chamber, for they work in pitch darkness and to let light into the chamber is as great a handicap to the termites as the sudden destruction of the sun would be to us. We cannot see in complete darkness.
Winged adult termites
The queen continues growing until, compared with the ordinary termite, she reaches a gigantic size, and becomes an immobile mass, still as a log. The only part of her which gives any sign of life is the little head, which remains unchanged. If you dissect the skin and body carefully and examine it under a microscope, you will be convinced that during her later stages of growth the queen is unable to make any voluntary movement, except of course of the head. You make think she could move like some worms do, by contraction and expansion. But you will find that no part of the body behind the head can be controlled by what was once an intricate central nervous system. Nor do I think that there can be any question of her regaining the power of movement temporarily, as for instance by emptying the sac for a while. I certainly have seen no indication of this. Besides, the very nerves in the body have changed into fluid. Both these theories, therefore, that the queen is able to move by contraction and expansion, or that she gains a temporary power of movement, must be discarded.
To continue with the queen's life-history, her first palace is a cell made of termite earth which rapidly becomes as hard as cement. Usually she just neatly fits into it. She is always much too huge to use the door of the cell as entrance or exit. If you wish to remove her you must break down the cell. The king and the workers, however, can come and go quite easily. She is fed and the eggs which she never ceases laying are removed to the breeding grounds by workers appointed to this task. The king apparently does nothing. He appears to be a mere hanger-on in the palace. Still the queen goes on growing. Here in her first palace- she has not attained one-third of her eventual size. At last she very nearly fills all the available space in the cell. There is barely room for the tiny workers to carry the eggs away across the insensate bulk. A terrible tragedy appears to be imminent -- it reminds us of the question: what will happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable mass? The human observer is helpless at the threat of this terrible fate. In spite of all his knowledge and intelligence he is unable to help in any way. But actually termites have never worried about it at all. They had a solution ready -- a very simple one. Just before her majesty finally outgrows her cell they build a second one, half as big again as the first. It is parallel and adjacent to the first, just as hard and with just such a narrow door. The queen is then removed and placed in the second cell where there is space for her to grow for perhaps another year. So she gets transposed from cell to cell until there have been about six changes with the queen in the last and biggest. The chamber doors are always equally small much too small for the queen to come or go by.
We must clearly establish another fact which makes the whole matter even more complicated. One could easily prove by measurement that the queen's subjects could not possibly move her. The lifting power of one termite can be estimated fairly closely, and the area of the queen's body available for workers to grasp during lifting can be measured. During the later stages it would need thousands more termites to lift her than there is available grasping space for the body.
We present to you the following facts:
The queen is incapable of movement.
The doors of the cell are too small for her to come or go by.
The insects cannot lift her.
Yet she vanishes from one cell to appear in another.
The only explanation that seems feasible is that there are several queens and that it is not the same one each time. If the first gets too big for her cell, she is killed and eaten and then the workers carry a potential queen into the second cell where she develops into a queen. The only intelligent explanation, perhaps, and very simple, now we have thought of it.
The only pity is that it is not true. We have been deceived by the analogy of the bees, which make queens, kill, and move them. It is quite an easy matter to mark the termite queen and so prove that it is the same queen which gets moved. I have tested many theories brought forward by friends who have studied entomology, but have never found one which coincided with all the facts. Perhaps one day a future Fabre will discover the truth.
The Soul of the White Ant Preface and Introduction
The Soul
of the
White Ant
by
Eugène N. Marais
Translated by
Winifred de Kok
1937
First published in Afrikaans under the title
Die Siel van die Mier
Publisher's note
Eugène Marais was born in a farming community near Pretoria in 1872. Journalism was his first career, but he later studied law in London, and by 1910 was in Johannesburg trying to establish himself as an advocate. Increasing depression drove him to retreat to Waterberg, a mountain fastness in northern Transvaal. Settling near a large group of chacma baboons, he became the first man to conduct a prolonged study of primates in the wild. It was this period that produced My Friends the Baboons and provided the major inspiration for The Soul of the Ape. He returned to Pretoria to practise law, to resume his career as a journalist, to continue his animal studies and to write poetry in Afrikaans. In 1926, the year after he had published a definitive article on his original research and conclusions about the white ant, a world-famous European author took half Marais's life-work and published it as his own. This plagiarizing may well have been a major factor in Marais's final collapse. Plagued for many years by ill-health and an addiction to morphine, he took his own life in March 1936.
Contents
Translator's Preface
Introduction
1. The Beginning of a Termitary
2. Unsolved Secrets
3. Language in the Insect World
4. What is the Psyche?
5. Luminosity in the Animal Kingdom
6. The Composite Animal
7. Somatic Death
8. The Development of the Composite Animal
9. The Birth of the Termite Community
10. Pain and Travail in Nature
11. Uninherited Instincts
12. The Mysterious Power which Governs
13. The Water Supply
14. The First Architects
15. The Queen in her Cell
Translator's Preface
THE name of Eugène N. Marais is known to all Afrikaans-speaking South Africans as a writer of short stories and verse. He himself, however, would wish to be remembered for his lifelong study of termites and apes. He began life after leaving college as a journalist, then studied medicine for four years, but eventually took up law and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple. A scholar and a man of culture, he chose nevertheless to live for a period extending over many years in a 'rondhavel' or hut in the lonely Waterberg mountains, learning to know and make friends with a troop of wild baboons, whose behaviour he wished to study. He tamed them to such a degree that he could move among them and handle them with impunity. At the same time he busied himself with the other end of the chain and studied termite life, a study which often meant tremendous drudgery and needed endless patience.
During those years Eugène Marais was not concerned with publicity in any form, but a friend induced him to write an article for an Afrikaans periodical called Die Huisgenoot. This proved so popular that the author was besieged for more, and the articles continued for almost two years.
His years of unceasing work on the veld led Eugène Marais to formulate his theory that the individual nest of the termites is similar in every respect to the organism of an animal, workers and soldiers resembling red and white blood corpuscles, the fungus gardens the digestive organs, the queen functioning as the brain, and the sexual flight being in every aspect analogous to the escape of spermatozoa and ova.
About six years after these articles appeared, Maurice Maeterlinck published his book, The Life of the White Ant, in which he describes this organic unity of the termitary and compares it with the human body. This theory aroused great interest at the time and was generally accepted as an original one formulated by Maeterlinck. The fact that an unknown South African observer had developed the theory after many years of indefatigable labour was not generally known in Europe. Excerpts from Marais's articles had, however, appeared in both the Belgian and the French press at the time of their publication in South Africa. Indeed, the original Afrikaans articles would have been intelligible to any Fleming, for Afrikaans and Flemish are very similar.
No one who reads this book, based on the articles published so many years earlier than Maeterlinck's book, would hesitate to give its author the honour due to him.
Eugène Marais intended writing a fuller and more scientific volume, but this intention was frustrated by his untimely death a few months ago.
-- Winifred De Kok (London, 1937)
Introduction
by Keith Addison
EUGÈNE Marais was a South African poet, a story-teller, a journalist, a lawyer, a psychologist, a natural scientist, a drug-addict, and a great genius -- an abused and forgotten genius, and the world is the worse off for that.
He was master of a science that was only invented 50 years later (ethology); it was 60 years before anyone else attempted to study what he'd studied (ape societies in the wild); he described natural mechanisms and systems that were not identified by mainstream science until 40 years later (pheromones); and neither science nor society has yet caught up with many of his findings and conclusions.
As a boy growing up in Cape Town in the 1950s I knew of him as an Afrikaans poet, an early champion of the language of the Boers. We studied his poem Winternag (Winter's Night) in school, and duly thought nothing of it. He could have taught us so much more, if they'd let him.
Like many of us, I always had animals or birds or creatures of some kind around, or in my pocket or hanging off my clothes -- and so did Marais. His son wrote of him: "[He] was never without tame apes, snakes, scorpions, and the like."
At one time I became fascinated by ants, and spent ages lying on my stomach on the ground studying them. "What are you doing?" my mother asked once. "Counting ants," I told her. It became a family joke. If only I'd known what Marais had to say about ants!
It was only much later that I really discovered Marais, and I guess most of us still haven't. Which is rather typical of Marais, and that's a tragedy -- which is also typical of him.
As a scientist it was the mind of man, the human psyche, that preoccupied Marais, and to find the key to its nature it was to nature that he turned, rather than to humans. He followed two parallel paths, the study of the animals most like humans, the primates, and the study of creatures that could hardly be more alien to us, the social insects -- termites, known in his day as white ants. In both fields his findings were revolutionary.
In a way Marais was lucky. For entirely unrelated reasons he stumbled upon unique opportunities for his research. One reason for his success was that nobody else had had the chance to do that kind of work before, nor would have again for many years afterwards. But it was what he made of his opportunities that counted. And where Marais's luck led him was another matter.
Marais was born to a traditional Afrikaner family in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal in 1872. He had a rather strange schooling: the only teacher available was a Church of England missionary who could not or would not speak a word of Marais's native Afrikaans -- known as "kitchen Dutch" in the snooty British colony of the Cape, where it was the patois of the mixed-race Cape Coloured servant-class. So Marais learnt English.
In 1890, at the age of 18, he took his first job, as a journalist for the newspaper Land en Volk (Country and People) in Pretoria, the capital. A year later he was the editor, and by the time he was 20 he owned the newspaper.
His acrid comments as a parliamentary reporter at the Volksraad (People's Council) saw the entire Council vote to ban him from the press gallery. Later he was charged with high treason for opposing the president, Paul Kruger, but he was acquitted by the Supreme Court.
It was at this early stage of his career that his life-long struggle with drug-addiction began. Marais suffered severely from the acute pain of neuralgia, and someone suggested morphine, which was readily available then. He never shook off the habit. (His son and others referred obliquely to his bouts with the drug as his "ailing health".)
In 1894 came a severe blow that undoubtedly changed his life. Aged only 22, he married a young woman from Natal, but she died only a year later after their son was born. He never married again. Soon afterwards he gave up journalism, left Pretoria and went to London to study law. He qualified and was admitted to the bar at the Inner Temple. He studied medicine at the same time but in 1899, before he could qualify, the Boer War broke out, and Marais was put on parole as an enemy alien.
The British Redcoats were no match for the fast-moving Boer commandos -- 200 years of skirmishes and mutual cattle raiding with the Black tribes had made the tough farmers masters of guerrilla tactics. The British, lacking skill, tried sheer weight of numbers instead -- in the end 450,000 of Britain's cream were pitted against only 80,000 Boer fighters. That didn't work either.
Britain's Lord Kitchener finally "solved" the problem. The British cordoned off the land, burned the Boers' farms and herded their women, children and old people into concentration camps, where more than 20,000 died of disease and malnutrition.
In London, Marais was distraught. He escaped from Britain and was soon in Central Africa heading towards the Limpopo River with supplies of munitions and medicines to aid his countrymen. But before he got there the Boer generals surrendered and the war ended -- and Marais caught malaria and landed up in hospital in Delagoa Bay (Mozambique). As with the morphine, he never shook off the malaria, it recurred throughout his life.
The war left him shattered. He wrote later: "The most enduring result was that it made me far more bitter than men who took part in the war at a more advanced age and who had had less to do with the English before the war. It was for purely sentimental reasons that I refused to write in any language but Afrikaans, notwithstanding the fact that I am far more fluent and more at ease in English."
He did however write several learned papers in English, but for the most part he'd doomed himself and his work to the confines of an obscure language with no influence in the world of affairs, and it was to prove his undoing.
In 1904 Marais returned to Pretoria, but, shunning human society, he soon left for the Waterberg, an isolated range of mountains in the Northern Transvaal, where he and a friend lived for the next three years. This was part of the depopulated farming country Kitchener had cleared, nobody had lived there for years. Marais's only neighbours were a large troop of wild chacma baboons, which in the meantime had all but forgotten that man is something for a baboon to fear.
Years later he wrote in a letter: "No other worker in the field ever had the opportunities I had of studying primates under perfectly natural conditions. In other countries you are lucky if you catch a glimpse of the same troop twice in a day. I lived among a troop of wild baboons for three years. I followed them on their daily excursions; slept among them; fed them night and morning on mealies; learned to know each one individually; taught them to trust and to love me -- and also to hate me so vehemently that my life was several times in danger. So uncertain was their affection that I had always to go armed with a Mauser automatic under the left armpit like the American gangster!
"But I learned the innermost secrets of their lives. You will be surprised to learn of the dim and remote regions of the mind into which it led me. I think I discovered the real place in nature of the hypnotic condition in the lower animals and men. I have an entirely new explanation of the so-called subconscious mind and the reason for its survival in man. I think that I can prove that Freud's entire conception is based on a fabric of fallacy. No man can ever attain to anywhere near a true conception of the subconscious in man who does not know the primates under natural conditions."
But the Boer farmers began drifting back to the land and their ruined farms, and farmers and baboons have always been deadly enemies -- there is no raider of farm crops to equal a baboon. With the farmers came their guns, and an end to any trust the baboons had developed for Marais. His work now impossible, he moved back to Pretoria to work as an advocate and a journalist, and despite recurrent bouts of "bad health", he continued his scientific research at every opportunity.
His work on termites led him to a series of stunning discoveries. He developed a fresh and radically different view of how a termite colony works, and indeed of what a termite colony is. This was far in advance of any contemporary work. In 1923 he began writing a series of popular articles on termites for the Afrikaans press and in 1925 he published a major article summing up his work in the Afrikaans magazine Die Huisgenoot.
Few people spoke Afrikaans then, as now, but it's quite similar to the Dutch it stemmed from and any Dutchman or Fleming can read it without difficulty.
Maurice Maeterlinck was a leading literary figure of the time. In 1911 he won the Nobel Prize for literature following the success of his play The Bluebird. In 1901 he had written The Life of the Bee, a mixture of natural history and philosophy, but he was a dramatist and a poet, not a scientist. He was also a Fleming.
In 1926, one year after Die Huisgenoot published Marais's article, Maeterlinck stole Marais's work and published it under his own name, without acknowledgement, in a book titled The Life of the White Ant, first published in French and soon afterwards in English and several other languages.
Maeterlinck's book was met with outrage in South Africa. Later, in 1935, Marais wrote to Dr Winifred de Kok in London as she was beginning her English translation of The Soul of the White Ant:
"You must understand that it was a theory which was not only new to science but which no man born of woman could have arrived at without a knowledge of all the facts on which it was based; and these Maeterlinck quite obviously did not possess. He even committed the faux pas of taking certain Latin scientific words invented by me to be current and generally accepted Latin terms.
"The publishers in South Africa started crying to high heaven and endeavoured to induce me to take legal action in Europe, a step for which I possessed neither the means nor inclination. The press in South Africa, however, quite valorously waved the cudgels in my behalf. The Johannesburg Star [South Africa's biggest English-language daily newspaper] published plagiarized portions which left nothing to the imagination of readers. The Afrikaans publishers of the original articles communicated the facts to one of our ambassadorial representatives in Europe and suggested that Maeterlinck be approached. Whether or not this was done, I never ascertained. In any case, Maeterlinck, like other great ones on Olympus, maintained a mighty and dignified silence."
The 1927 files at The Star to which Marais referred were checked and confirmed 40 years later by American writer Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis. "Maeterlinck's guilt is clear," Ardrey wrote. It is easily confirmed by a comparison of the two books. Marais's point is indisputable: his picture of the termitary is startlingly original, it could not possibly have been hypothesised or inferred without a great deal of original research, at the very least -- and yet there it is in Maeterlinck's book.
Though Marais made light of the issue in his letters of later years, he never regained the clear focus and command that marked his earlier scientific investigations before Maeterlinck committed his plagiarism. It was a bitter blow for Marais, the last of many.
"I find no record of scientific accomplishment after 1927," Ardrey wrote.
Life went on for Marais, after a fashion. He wasn't entirely embittered, still retaining his famed charm, especially with children, which tells much -- he spent much of his time with children, wreathing them in magic with his wonderful tales.
Robert Ardrey tells the story:
"A good many years ago Professor J. S. Weiner, Oxford's celebrated anatomist, told me a story about Marais that better than any other I have ever heard probed the hidden darkness. Weiner is a South African who grew up in a district of Pretoria called Sunnyside and many years later achieved world fame when with Kenneth P. Oakley of the British Museum, he proved that the Piltdown skull, then presumed to be the remains of man's earliest ancestor, was a hoax. I had never met Weiner when, in Rome for a conference, he came to our apartment to spend an evening. And he startled me, for he had no more than found a chair before he asked why I had dedicated African Genesis to Marais.
"There was little to explain. I said that I felt science had neglected Marais, and that, while I was not a scientist, it had seemed the least I could do. 'I'm glad you did it,' said Weiner. 'I know I've always felt guilty about him.' And he told his story.
"When Weiner was a boy in Sunnyside one of the most thrilling of events was the sight of Eugène Marais -- dignified, dressed always in immaculate white -- walking down towards the river in the evening. It was a signal to all the children along the street. They came piling out of yards and gardens and upstairs rooms to follow Marais to the river. There he'd find an old stump or a log to sit on, while they arranged themselves on the ground. And he would tell stories. All acquaintances recall him as one of the most consummate story-tellers of his time and place, but the mightiest of witnesses were the children at his feet, listening with long-held breath to his stories of bush and veld and dusty roads where mambas slink. The dark would come on. He would rise and go home, and the children, full of magic, would return to new worlds.
"Marais had a room in a house just a few doors down the street. Weiner's sister, friendly with several girls who lived in the house, had come to know him, and one day asked Weiner to return a book to Marais's room. Clutching the book, consumed by the excited possibility of meeting the magic-maker alone, he went to the house, found the room, knocked. There was no answer. He tried the door. It was unlocked. He entered cautiously. The room was dank with disorder. And there was a strange smell. He put down the book and fled.
"Many years later -- in 1940, years after Marais was dead -- Weiner was a medical student at St George's Hospital in London. In a pharmacological course the students were learning to identify a variety of pharmaceutical items. He was handed a sample of some drug with a very queer smell. Instantly he had a vivid recollection -- a total recall -- of a room somewhere. He struggled to identify the room, and knew it somewhere in South Africa. Then it came to him -- Marais's little room. The drug was morphine."
-- Robert Ardrey, 1969, Introduction, The Soul of the Ape
Between continuing bouts of "ailing health", whether due to morphine or malaria, Marais worked as an advocate, he wrote articles and stories. But what should have been written and bequeathed to the world wasn't done. The Soul of the White Ant was published in Afrikaans, and then later in English, but the more scientific work from his notes and studies that should have amplified it was not forthcoming.
The planned companion volume on the psyche of the baboon, The Soul of the Ape, was never finished. Several excerpts were published in Afrikaans, but the book itself didn't appear.
A further work summing up and integrating his findings and conclusions in the two branches of his investigations should have followed, but it didn't.
In 1936, Eugène Marais killed himself with a shotgun on a farm near Pretoria.
Soon afterwards Dr de Kok wrote to Marais's son asking about his father's papers, and especially about the manuscript of the unfinished and unpublished The Soul of the Ape, which Marais had discussed with her a few months before his death. The son responded: "There is no sign of a manuscript and no notes."
In 1968, 32 years later, without explanation, the son handed the unfinished manuscript of The Soul of the Ape to Marais's old publishers in Cape Town, handwritten in Marais's hand, in English, and, at last, it was published.
It is a flawed work, and Marais knew it, as his letters make clear. Maybe before his death he told his son that, or maybe the son decided it for himself.
One flaw is that it's definitely not finished -- suddenly it just stops. There's also an unevenness to it, and in the sense that informs it. The Marais of The Soul of the White Ant is a charming and engaging fellow, a thoroughly good companion, but in The Soul of the Ape another Marais seems occasionally to intrude, perhaps the "sombre side" his friends sometimes alluded to, the "hidden darkness" his children friends never saw in their Pied Piper.
The book is still highly readable nonetheless. Marais's work and his findings shine through -- and profound they are, as pertinent today as they were then, or more so. And the more welcome for having been thought lost forever.
But there should have been more, the work should have been finished, it could and should have been rounded off with so much more of the fruits of Marais's copious fieldwork and his extraordinarily clear insight. Maybe it had to be approached with a sense of joy in nature that Marais could no longer muster. If so, much of the blame for that is to be laid at the door of Maurice Maeterlinck, plagiarist, who left nothing remotely comparable in his own work by way of compensation.
Yet, the crushing note of a shotgun blast fails to set a judgment on the tortured life of Eugène Marais. That he could rise above his sufferings and misfortunes to leave us these two gems of his work says far more about the human spirit that he devoted his life to studying, and which is their true subject.
[Acknowledgements: To Robert Ardrey for his research on Marais and for reproducing some of Marais's letters to Dr de Kok; to Dr de Kok in her Translator's Preface to the English version of The Soul of the White Ant; and to Marais's son in his Biographical Note published in the original English edition. -- K.A., Osaka, Japan, April 2002.]
of the
White Ant
by
Eugène N. Marais
Translated by
Winifred de Kok
1937
First published in Afrikaans under the title
Die Siel van die Mier
Publisher's note
Eugène Marais was born in a farming community near Pretoria in 1872. Journalism was his first career, but he later studied law in London, and by 1910 was in Johannesburg trying to establish himself as an advocate. Increasing depression drove him to retreat to Waterberg, a mountain fastness in northern Transvaal. Settling near a large group of chacma baboons, he became the first man to conduct a prolonged study of primates in the wild. It was this period that produced My Friends the Baboons and provided the major inspiration for The Soul of the Ape. He returned to Pretoria to practise law, to resume his career as a journalist, to continue his animal studies and to write poetry in Afrikaans. In 1926, the year after he had published a definitive article on his original research and conclusions about the white ant, a world-famous European author took half Marais's life-work and published it as his own. This plagiarizing may well have been a major factor in Marais's final collapse. Plagued for many years by ill-health and an addiction to morphine, he took his own life in March 1936.
Contents
Translator's Preface
Introduction
1. The Beginning of a Termitary
2. Unsolved Secrets
3. Language in the Insect World
4. What is the Psyche?
5. Luminosity in the Animal Kingdom
6. The Composite Animal
7. Somatic Death
8. The Development of the Composite Animal
9. The Birth of the Termite Community
10. Pain and Travail in Nature
11. Uninherited Instincts
12. The Mysterious Power which Governs
13. The Water Supply
14. The First Architects
15. The Queen in her Cell
Translator's Preface
THE name of Eugène N. Marais is known to all Afrikaans-speaking South Africans as a writer of short stories and verse. He himself, however, would wish to be remembered for his lifelong study of termites and apes. He began life after leaving college as a journalist, then studied medicine for four years, but eventually took up law and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple. A scholar and a man of culture, he chose nevertheless to live for a period extending over many years in a 'rondhavel' or hut in the lonely Waterberg mountains, learning to know and make friends with a troop of wild baboons, whose behaviour he wished to study. He tamed them to such a degree that he could move among them and handle them with impunity. At the same time he busied himself with the other end of the chain and studied termite life, a study which often meant tremendous drudgery and needed endless patience.
During those years Eugène Marais was not concerned with publicity in any form, but a friend induced him to write an article for an Afrikaans periodical called Die Huisgenoot. This proved so popular that the author was besieged for more, and the articles continued for almost two years.
His years of unceasing work on the veld led Eugène Marais to formulate his theory that the individual nest of the termites is similar in every respect to the organism of an animal, workers and soldiers resembling red and white blood corpuscles, the fungus gardens the digestive organs, the queen functioning as the brain, and the sexual flight being in every aspect analogous to the escape of spermatozoa and ova.
About six years after these articles appeared, Maurice Maeterlinck published his book, The Life of the White Ant, in which he describes this organic unity of the termitary and compares it with the human body. This theory aroused great interest at the time and was generally accepted as an original one formulated by Maeterlinck. The fact that an unknown South African observer had developed the theory after many years of indefatigable labour was not generally known in Europe. Excerpts from Marais's articles had, however, appeared in both the Belgian and the French press at the time of their publication in South Africa. Indeed, the original Afrikaans articles would have been intelligible to any Fleming, for Afrikaans and Flemish are very similar.
No one who reads this book, based on the articles published so many years earlier than Maeterlinck's book, would hesitate to give its author the honour due to him.
Eugène Marais intended writing a fuller and more scientific volume, but this intention was frustrated by his untimely death a few months ago.
-- Winifred De Kok (London, 1937)
Introduction
by Keith Addison
EUGÈNE Marais was a South African poet, a story-teller, a journalist, a lawyer, a psychologist, a natural scientist, a drug-addict, and a great genius -- an abused and forgotten genius, and the world is the worse off for that.
He was master of a science that was only invented 50 years later (ethology); it was 60 years before anyone else attempted to study what he'd studied (ape societies in the wild); he described natural mechanisms and systems that were not identified by mainstream science until 40 years later (pheromones); and neither science nor society has yet caught up with many of his findings and conclusions.
As a boy growing up in Cape Town in the 1950s I knew of him as an Afrikaans poet, an early champion of the language of the Boers. We studied his poem Winternag (Winter's Night) in school, and duly thought nothing of it. He could have taught us so much more, if they'd let him.
Like many of us, I always had animals or birds or creatures of some kind around, or in my pocket or hanging off my clothes -- and so did Marais. His son wrote of him: "[He] was never without tame apes, snakes, scorpions, and the like."
At one time I became fascinated by ants, and spent ages lying on my stomach on the ground studying them. "What are you doing?" my mother asked once. "Counting ants," I told her. It became a family joke. If only I'd known what Marais had to say about ants!
It was only much later that I really discovered Marais, and I guess most of us still haven't. Which is rather typical of Marais, and that's a tragedy -- which is also typical of him.
As a scientist it was the mind of man, the human psyche, that preoccupied Marais, and to find the key to its nature it was to nature that he turned, rather than to humans. He followed two parallel paths, the study of the animals most like humans, the primates, and the study of creatures that could hardly be more alien to us, the social insects -- termites, known in his day as white ants. In both fields his findings were revolutionary.
In a way Marais was lucky. For entirely unrelated reasons he stumbled upon unique opportunities for his research. One reason for his success was that nobody else had had the chance to do that kind of work before, nor would have again for many years afterwards. But it was what he made of his opportunities that counted. And where Marais's luck led him was another matter.
Marais was born to a traditional Afrikaner family in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal in 1872. He had a rather strange schooling: the only teacher available was a Church of England missionary who could not or would not speak a word of Marais's native Afrikaans -- known as "kitchen Dutch" in the snooty British colony of the Cape, where it was the patois of the mixed-race Cape Coloured servant-class. So Marais learnt English.
In 1890, at the age of 18, he took his first job, as a journalist for the newspaper Land en Volk (Country and People) in Pretoria, the capital. A year later he was the editor, and by the time he was 20 he owned the newspaper.
His acrid comments as a parliamentary reporter at the Volksraad (People's Council) saw the entire Council vote to ban him from the press gallery. Later he was charged with high treason for opposing the president, Paul Kruger, but he was acquitted by the Supreme Court.
It was at this early stage of his career that his life-long struggle with drug-addiction began. Marais suffered severely from the acute pain of neuralgia, and someone suggested morphine, which was readily available then. He never shook off the habit. (His son and others referred obliquely to his bouts with the drug as his "ailing health".)
In 1894 came a severe blow that undoubtedly changed his life. Aged only 22, he married a young woman from Natal, but she died only a year later after their son was born. He never married again. Soon afterwards he gave up journalism, left Pretoria and went to London to study law. He qualified and was admitted to the bar at the Inner Temple. He studied medicine at the same time but in 1899, before he could qualify, the Boer War broke out, and Marais was put on parole as an enemy alien.
The British Redcoats were no match for the fast-moving Boer commandos -- 200 years of skirmishes and mutual cattle raiding with the Black tribes had made the tough farmers masters of guerrilla tactics. The British, lacking skill, tried sheer weight of numbers instead -- in the end 450,000 of Britain's cream were pitted against only 80,000 Boer fighters. That didn't work either.
Britain's Lord Kitchener finally "solved" the problem. The British cordoned off the land, burned the Boers' farms and herded their women, children and old people into concentration camps, where more than 20,000 died of disease and malnutrition.
In London, Marais was distraught. He escaped from Britain and was soon in Central Africa heading towards the Limpopo River with supplies of munitions and medicines to aid his countrymen. But before he got there the Boer generals surrendered and the war ended -- and Marais caught malaria and landed up in hospital in Delagoa Bay (Mozambique). As with the morphine, he never shook off the malaria, it recurred throughout his life.
The war left him shattered. He wrote later: "The most enduring result was that it made me far more bitter than men who took part in the war at a more advanced age and who had had less to do with the English before the war. It was for purely sentimental reasons that I refused to write in any language but Afrikaans, notwithstanding the fact that I am far more fluent and more at ease in English."
He did however write several learned papers in English, but for the most part he'd doomed himself and his work to the confines of an obscure language with no influence in the world of affairs, and it was to prove his undoing.
In 1904 Marais returned to Pretoria, but, shunning human society, he soon left for the Waterberg, an isolated range of mountains in the Northern Transvaal, where he and a friend lived for the next three years. This was part of the depopulated farming country Kitchener had cleared, nobody had lived there for years. Marais's only neighbours were a large troop of wild chacma baboons, which in the meantime had all but forgotten that man is something for a baboon to fear.
Years later he wrote in a letter: "No other worker in the field ever had the opportunities I had of studying primates under perfectly natural conditions. In other countries you are lucky if you catch a glimpse of the same troop twice in a day. I lived among a troop of wild baboons for three years. I followed them on their daily excursions; slept among them; fed them night and morning on mealies; learned to know each one individually; taught them to trust and to love me -- and also to hate me so vehemently that my life was several times in danger. So uncertain was their affection that I had always to go armed with a Mauser automatic under the left armpit like the American gangster!
"But I learned the innermost secrets of their lives. You will be surprised to learn of the dim and remote regions of the mind into which it led me. I think I discovered the real place in nature of the hypnotic condition in the lower animals and men. I have an entirely new explanation of the so-called subconscious mind and the reason for its survival in man. I think that I can prove that Freud's entire conception is based on a fabric of fallacy. No man can ever attain to anywhere near a true conception of the subconscious in man who does not know the primates under natural conditions."
But the Boer farmers began drifting back to the land and their ruined farms, and farmers and baboons have always been deadly enemies -- there is no raider of farm crops to equal a baboon. With the farmers came their guns, and an end to any trust the baboons had developed for Marais. His work now impossible, he moved back to Pretoria to work as an advocate and a journalist, and despite recurrent bouts of "bad health", he continued his scientific research at every opportunity.
His work on termites led him to a series of stunning discoveries. He developed a fresh and radically different view of how a termite colony works, and indeed of what a termite colony is. This was far in advance of any contemporary work. In 1923 he began writing a series of popular articles on termites for the Afrikaans press and in 1925 he published a major article summing up his work in the Afrikaans magazine Die Huisgenoot.
Few people spoke Afrikaans then, as now, but it's quite similar to the Dutch it stemmed from and any Dutchman or Fleming can read it without difficulty.
Maurice Maeterlinck was a leading literary figure of the time. In 1911 he won the Nobel Prize for literature following the success of his play The Bluebird. In 1901 he had written The Life of the Bee, a mixture of natural history and philosophy, but he was a dramatist and a poet, not a scientist. He was also a Fleming.
In 1926, one year after Die Huisgenoot published Marais's article, Maeterlinck stole Marais's work and published it under his own name, without acknowledgement, in a book titled The Life of the White Ant, first published in French and soon afterwards in English and several other languages.
Maeterlinck's book was met with outrage in South Africa. Later, in 1935, Marais wrote to Dr Winifred de Kok in London as she was beginning her English translation of The Soul of the White Ant:
"You must understand that it was a theory which was not only new to science but which no man born of woman could have arrived at without a knowledge of all the facts on which it was based; and these Maeterlinck quite obviously did not possess. He even committed the faux pas of taking certain Latin scientific words invented by me to be current and generally accepted Latin terms.
"The publishers in South Africa started crying to high heaven and endeavoured to induce me to take legal action in Europe, a step for which I possessed neither the means nor inclination. The press in South Africa, however, quite valorously waved the cudgels in my behalf. The Johannesburg Star [South Africa's biggest English-language daily newspaper] published plagiarized portions which left nothing to the imagination of readers. The Afrikaans publishers of the original articles communicated the facts to one of our ambassadorial representatives in Europe and suggested that Maeterlinck be approached. Whether or not this was done, I never ascertained. In any case, Maeterlinck, like other great ones on Olympus, maintained a mighty and dignified silence."
The 1927 files at The Star to which Marais referred were checked and confirmed 40 years later by American writer Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis. "Maeterlinck's guilt is clear," Ardrey wrote. It is easily confirmed by a comparison of the two books. Marais's point is indisputable: his picture of the termitary is startlingly original, it could not possibly have been hypothesised or inferred without a great deal of original research, at the very least -- and yet there it is in Maeterlinck's book.
Though Marais made light of the issue in his letters of later years, he never regained the clear focus and command that marked his earlier scientific investigations before Maeterlinck committed his plagiarism. It was a bitter blow for Marais, the last of many.
"I find no record of scientific accomplishment after 1927," Ardrey wrote.
Life went on for Marais, after a fashion. He wasn't entirely embittered, still retaining his famed charm, especially with children, which tells much -- he spent much of his time with children, wreathing them in magic with his wonderful tales.
Robert Ardrey tells the story:
"A good many years ago Professor J. S. Weiner, Oxford's celebrated anatomist, told me a story about Marais that better than any other I have ever heard probed the hidden darkness. Weiner is a South African who grew up in a district of Pretoria called Sunnyside and many years later achieved world fame when with Kenneth P. Oakley of the British Museum, he proved that the Piltdown skull, then presumed to be the remains of man's earliest ancestor, was a hoax. I had never met Weiner when, in Rome for a conference, he came to our apartment to spend an evening. And he startled me, for he had no more than found a chair before he asked why I had dedicated African Genesis to Marais.
"There was little to explain. I said that I felt science had neglected Marais, and that, while I was not a scientist, it had seemed the least I could do. 'I'm glad you did it,' said Weiner. 'I know I've always felt guilty about him.' And he told his story.
"When Weiner was a boy in Sunnyside one of the most thrilling of events was the sight of Eugène Marais -- dignified, dressed always in immaculate white -- walking down towards the river in the evening. It was a signal to all the children along the street. They came piling out of yards and gardens and upstairs rooms to follow Marais to the river. There he'd find an old stump or a log to sit on, while they arranged themselves on the ground. And he would tell stories. All acquaintances recall him as one of the most consummate story-tellers of his time and place, but the mightiest of witnesses were the children at his feet, listening with long-held breath to his stories of bush and veld and dusty roads where mambas slink. The dark would come on. He would rise and go home, and the children, full of magic, would return to new worlds.
"Marais had a room in a house just a few doors down the street. Weiner's sister, friendly with several girls who lived in the house, had come to know him, and one day asked Weiner to return a book to Marais's room. Clutching the book, consumed by the excited possibility of meeting the magic-maker alone, he went to the house, found the room, knocked. There was no answer. He tried the door. It was unlocked. He entered cautiously. The room was dank with disorder. And there was a strange smell. He put down the book and fled.
"Many years later -- in 1940, years after Marais was dead -- Weiner was a medical student at St George's Hospital in London. In a pharmacological course the students were learning to identify a variety of pharmaceutical items. He was handed a sample of some drug with a very queer smell. Instantly he had a vivid recollection -- a total recall -- of a room somewhere. He struggled to identify the room, and knew it somewhere in South Africa. Then it came to him -- Marais's little room. The drug was morphine."
-- Robert Ardrey, 1969, Introduction, The Soul of the Ape
Between continuing bouts of "ailing health", whether due to morphine or malaria, Marais worked as an advocate, he wrote articles and stories. But what should have been written and bequeathed to the world wasn't done. The Soul of the White Ant was published in Afrikaans, and then later in English, but the more scientific work from his notes and studies that should have amplified it was not forthcoming.
The planned companion volume on the psyche of the baboon, The Soul of the Ape, was never finished. Several excerpts were published in Afrikaans, but the book itself didn't appear.
A further work summing up and integrating his findings and conclusions in the two branches of his investigations should have followed, but it didn't.
In 1936, Eugène Marais killed himself with a shotgun on a farm near Pretoria.
Soon afterwards Dr de Kok wrote to Marais's son asking about his father's papers, and especially about the manuscript of the unfinished and unpublished The Soul of the Ape, which Marais had discussed with her a few months before his death. The son responded: "There is no sign of a manuscript and no notes."
In 1968, 32 years later, without explanation, the son handed the unfinished manuscript of The Soul of the Ape to Marais's old publishers in Cape Town, handwritten in Marais's hand, in English, and, at last, it was published.
It is a flawed work, and Marais knew it, as his letters make clear. Maybe before his death he told his son that, or maybe the son decided it for himself.
One flaw is that it's definitely not finished -- suddenly it just stops. There's also an unevenness to it, and in the sense that informs it. The Marais of The Soul of the White Ant is a charming and engaging fellow, a thoroughly good companion, but in The Soul of the Ape another Marais seems occasionally to intrude, perhaps the "sombre side" his friends sometimes alluded to, the "hidden darkness" his children friends never saw in their Pied Piper.
The book is still highly readable nonetheless. Marais's work and his findings shine through -- and profound they are, as pertinent today as they were then, or more so. And the more welcome for having been thought lost forever.
But there should have been more, the work should have been finished, it could and should have been rounded off with so much more of the fruits of Marais's copious fieldwork and his extraordinarily clear insight. Maybe it had to be approached with a sense of joy in nature that Marais could no longer muster. If so, much of the blame for that is to be laid at the door of Maurice Maeterlinck, plagiarist, who left nothing remotely comparable in his own work by way of compensation.
Yet, the crushing note of a shotgun blast fails to set a judgment on the tortured life of Eugène Marais. That he could rise above his sufferings and misfortunes to leave us these two gems of his work says far more about the human spirit that he devoted his life to studying, and which is their true subject.
[Acknowledgements: To Robert Ardrey for his research on Marais and for reproducing some of Marais's letters to Dr de Kok; to Dr de Kok in her Translator's Preface to the English version of The Soul of the White Ant; and to Marais's son in his Biographical Note published in the original English edition. -- K.A., Osaka, Japan, April 2002.]
Thursday, May 14, 2009
An Archipelago of Local Responses Nicolas Bourriaud on the Altermodern
The Tate Triennial is opening in London this spring, put together this time by the French curator Nicolas Bourrioud who became renowned for conceiving the term 'relational aesthetics'. He has seized the exhibition as an opportunity to further explore his newest art historical concept: altermodernity.
Charles Avery, Untitled, (Traveller, 2008, (portret Nicolas Bourriaud)
Christophe Gallois:
The exhibition you are preparing for the Tate Triennial is articulated around a term you coined, the “altermodern.” You present this concept as a rereading of the notion of modernity through the specifics of the context we’re evolving in today. Could you elaborate on the characteristics of the contemporary world that led you to rethink the notion of modernity?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I think that the principal new element is the stage of cultural globalization to which we’ve come today, which entails two phenomena. The first is uniformity, under the aegis of mass production, a process of worldwide standardization dominated by the leisure industries, which treats local cultures as so many folklores to preserve. The second, in contrast to the first, is the cultural retreat into fundamentalism, into essentialist positions that are purely about identity. These two contradictory tendencies function like two ends of a vice that’s tightening upon us: on one side, the assertion of roots and idiosyncrasies as absolute values, and on the other, the tacit acceptance of a standardized culture that destroys every singularity.’
Christophe Gallois:
The zone that you explore with ‘altermodern’ then would position itself as an alternative to these two directions…
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘Absolutely, there is a third path that avoids both of these obstacles. And, given this new element of globalization, it merges with the need to return to the modern gesture. In my opinion, the essence of modernity is exodus, the uprooting from any identifying definition of the individual. This exodus is furthermore encouraged today by the very thing it’s fighting: globalization. The “Altermodern” functions in culture in the way that alterglobalism, the term that inspired it, functions in the political sphere. In fact, alterglobalism isn’t the opposite of globalism; it proposes an alternative that isn’t singular and all-embracing, but rather is a set of responses to specific situations, an archipelago of local responses.’
Christophe Gallois:
The altermodernity you’re describing is characterized by a dimension that is at once spatial and temporal: you speak in particular of time as the last continent left to explore. One of the underlying questions in your project is that of contemporaneity. In your introductory text, you also ask, ‘What does modernity mean today?’
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘What defines our era is that we live, for the first time in the history of humankind, on a planet that no longer has a terra incognita. A planet that is “Google-earthed,” covered by the satellite grid, in which even the remotest corner is known. For the first time we have an absolute totality. This revolution corresponds to economic globalization: “one world, one system.” Time, the past, history all become driving forces today because they correspond, as you just said, to the last continent left to explore. This dynamic corresponds to the idea that when traveling in space, one also travels in time. For contemporary artists, this particular situation produces a spatialized vision of time. Today, artists climb the steep slopes of history like so many geographical territories. In a certain way, time was reabsorbed by geography, and ever since, artists have been working on a map in four dimensions, which includes history. That’s why genealogy and archeology are significant in contemporary work: the more we can track the present, the less we need roots, because time is then composed of infinite strata without origin.’
Christophe Gallois:
On many levels, this idea of the altermodern seems to situate itself in the continuity of your previous work, notably crystallized around the terms relational aesthetics and postproduction. It seems that there are shared points between this earlier work and what you’re developing here—for example, around artistic practices that are conceived of as displacements or navigations in a universe of signs, practices of appropriation and usage—but also differences. Altermodern is characterized perhaps by an approach that is more directly tied to the social and political context. How do you locate the altermodern in relation to relational aesthetics and postproduction?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘You could say that it’s the same reality shot from different angles. The first point of view—which I group under the term of relational aesthetics—corresponded to the desire to define an imaginary collective horizon for a group of artist with whom I developed in the early 1990s. This horizon was the interhuman sphere, in the same way that the imaginary horizon of the Pop Art generation was the sphere of consumption. Postproduction detailed a theory of the production of works starting from a certain relationship to history, which I defined as a relationship to usage: art history as a toolbox. The ideas that I develop around the term “altermodern” do in fact illustrate more political, and geopolitical, concerns. It’s no longer about determining a formal horizion nor theorizing processes of production, but about establishing the emergence of a state of mind, which cannot be reduced to a particular style. This term conveys a particular relationship to the present, the here and now. It comes directly from the political sphere: what is our position? Does this position require or generate an affirmative response? Do we need modernity, and, if so, what are the characteristics of this modernity? This exhibition is, above all, a debate.’
Christophe Gallois:
In the introductory text to your project, you note a distinction between postmodernism, based on a linear vision of time, and altermodernism, whose model would be the labyrinth.
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘This notion of the labyrinth echoes an anecdote from Claudio Magris’s Danube, which compares history to the idea of being in a train, riding the rails of time: a train comes toward us from the opposite direction, and for a few moments while runs along side us, we cannot tell if the train is going forward or backward. There are things that return; there are temporal loops. This notion is also very present in Borges, who describes time as a garden whose paths are forever forking. We’re not in the presence of a linear vision of time, but more of a sort of labyrinth. Postmodernism is the period where we didn’t know what to do with this labyrinth. I have the sense that today, wandering through the labyrinth has a positive value. This wandering seems to be the altermodern gesture par excellence: to finally find not what you’re looking for, but something else.’
Christophe Gallois:
The term ‘altermodern’ inscribes itself in the continuity of the notions of modernism and postmodernism that have defined the twentieth century, often to the greatest confusion. Recently, many have called into doubt the pertinence of these two notions. I’m thinking, for example, of Jacques Rancière, who questions the traditionally accepted trajectory of modernism to postmodernism. Modernism, according to him, was merely a way to simplify what he calls the ‘modern disorder’, while postmodernism failed by marking an artificial temporary rupture. Where do you situate yourself in this debate?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I would put myself more in the wake of Bruno Latour, when he says that we were never modern, at least in epistemological terms. We are still yet to arrive at a real relativism, which would no longer be indexed on a dominant culture, while ceasing to float in the postmodern “anything goes.” The relativism proposed by postmodernism is based on a sort of freezing of time. This was a period of resetting, equalizing and homogenizing different cultural hierarchies. How does one proceed, if not by re-ranking things through a new division, this time between altermodern and postmodern?’
Christophe Gallois:
An important aspect of your project is the reconsideration of multiculturalism. Taking a step back from the multiplication of cultural specificities and the accumulation of identities, you detect a more precise interest in contemporary practices for the formulation of what Edouard Glissant defined as processes of creolization, based on the association of different cultures, on the dynamics of translation, appropriation, and so on.
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I think that we are arriving at a historical moment where artists no longer start with their specific culture, but with a culture that is already globalized. The work is more about starting from this globalized culture and arriving at the specifics than working from one’s identity or origins, which leads the artist to become the logo for his or her own culture. Many artists, whose work doesn’t interest me very much, are content to simply present their culture, their roots or their identity as content in itself. I think that the attitude that consists in presenting oneself as above all “different” no longer works. Difference is something that has to arise; it can’t declare itself.’
Christophe Gallois:
Could you say a bit about the curatorial directions that you took for the Tate Triennial? What, according to you, are the type of artistic practices and exhibition formats that correspond to the ideas you are developing?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘An exhibition is a question asked, never the answers that one brings to it. The exhibition Altermodern is the product of a series of meetings and discussions with artists and different art professionals. Since I’m currently based in London, I started with the uniqueness of London as a global city, a city where people from all over the world pass through for longer or shorter stays.The exhibition is also characterized by a certain generational homogeneity in the choice of artists, a little like Traffic, the exhibition I made around relational aesthetics in 1996 in Bordeaux. One exception is the participation of Gustav Metzger, who I wanted to include in the project as an epigraph, in the sense that, in the context of Modernism in the 60s, he is the great thinker of ecological catastrophe and sustainable development, two notions with very strong echoes in the new generation of artist. Finally, there are common inquiries that emerged in the relationships between the works, almost after the fact: there is, for instance, a propensity to manipulate signs coming from very different horizons, and a broad use of black and white.’
Christophe Gallois:
The exhibition will also coincide with the publication of your new book. Could you say a few words about it?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘The book is called The Radicant. It’s somewhat like the theoretical log of this exhibition. In most dictionaries, the term “radicant” comes right after “radical.” “Radicant” is the opposite of “radical,” meaning what belongs to the root; “radicant” means an organism that takes root as it moves along the ground. This image perfectly illustrates the modernity that I see emerging. We are no longer dealing with the concept of the tabula rasa. The modernity that is coming is based on this globalized state of the imagination, on the individual’s ability to exist not in a form of being but in permanent becoming, on the artist’s capacity to invent forms that aren’t indexed on an identity but on displacement, on the permanent rotation of signs and on the formation of paths within a quasi-infinite landscape of signs and available forms, on a planetary scale.’
Altermodern, Tate Triennial 2009
TATE Britain
3 februari t/m 26 april
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, Sternberg Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-933128-42-9
Charles Avery, Untitled, (Traveller, 2008, (portret Nicolas Bourriaud)
Christophe Gallois:
The exhibition you are preparing for the Tate Triennial is articulated around a term you coined, the “altermodern.” You present this concept as a rereading of the notion of modernity through the specifics of the context we’re evolving in today. Could you elaborate on the characteristics of the contemporary world that led you to rethink the notion of modernity?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I think that the principal new element is the stage of cultural globalization to which we’ve come today, which entails two phenomena. The first is uniformity, under the aegis of mass production, a process of worldwide standardization dominated by the leisure industries, which treats local cultures as so many folklores to preserve. The second, in contrast to the first, is the cultural retreat into fundamentalism, into essentialist positions that are purely about identity. These two contradictory tendencies function like two ends of a vice that’s tightening upon us: on one side, the assertion of roots and idiosyncrasies as absolute values, and on the other, the tacit acceptance of a standardized culture that destroys every singularity.’
Christophe Gallois:
The zone that you explore with ‘altermodern’ then would position itself as an alternative to these two directions…
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘Absolutely, there is a third path that avoids both of these obstacles. And, given this new element of globalization, it merges with the need to return to the modern gesture. In my opinion, the essence of modernity is exodus, the uprooting from any identifying definition of the individual. This exodus is furthermore encouraged today by the very thing it’s fighting: globalization. The “Altermodern” functions in culture in the way that alterglobalism, the term that inspired it, functions in the political sphere. In fact, alterglobalism isn’t the opposite of globalism; it proposes an alternative that isn’t singular and all-embracing, but rather is a set of responses to specific situations, an archipelago of local responses.’
Christophe Gallois:
The altermodernity you’re describing is characterized by a dimension that is at once spatial and temporal: you speak in particular of time as the last continent left to explore. One of the underlying questions in your project is that of contemporaneity. In your introductory text, you also ask, ‘What does modernity mean today?’
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘What defines our era is that we live, for the first time in the history of humankind, on a planet that no longer has a terra incognita. A planet that is “Google-earthed,” covered by the satellite grid, in which even the remotest corner is known. For the first time we have an absolute totality. This revolution corresponds to economic globalization: “one world, one system.” Time, the past, history all become driving forces today because they correspond, as you just said, to the last continent left to explore. This dynamic corresponds to the idea that when traveling in space, one also travels in time. For contemporary artists, this particular situation produces a spatialized vision of time. Today, artists climb the steep slopes of history like so many geographical territories. In a certain way, time was reabsorbed by geography, and ever since, artists have been working on a map in four dimensions, which includes history. That’s why genealogy and archeology are significant in contemporary work: the more we can track the present, the less we need roots, because time is then composed of infinite strata without origin.’
Christophe Gallois:
On many levels, this idea of the altermodern seems to situate itself in the continuity of your previous work, notably crystallized around the terms relational aesthetics and postproduction. It seems that there are shared points between this earlier work and what you’re developing here—for example, around artistic practices that are conceived of as displacements or navigations in a universe of signs, practices of appropriation and usage—but also differences. Altermodern is characterized perhaps by an approach that is more directly tied to the social and political context. How do you locate the altermodern in relation to relational aesthetics and postproduction?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘You could say that it’s the same reality shot from different angles. The first point of view—which I group under the term of relational aesthetics—corresponded to the desire to define an imaginary collective horizon for a group of artist with whom I developed in the early 1990s. This horizon was the interhuman sphere, in the same way that the imaginary horizon of the Pop Art generation was the sphere of consumption. Postproduction detailed a theory of the production of works starting from a certain relationship to history, which I defined as a relationship to usage: art history as a toolbox. The ideas that I develop around the term “altermodern” do in fact illustrate more political, and geopolitical, concerns. It’s no longer about determining a formal horizion nor theorizing processes of production, but about establishing the emergence of a state of mind, which cannot be reduced to a particular style. This term conveys a particular relationship to the present, the here and now. It comes directly from the political sphere: what is our position? Does this position require or generate an affirmative response? Do we need modernity, and, if so, what are the characteristics of this modernity? This exhibition is, above all, a debate.’
Christophe Gallois:
In the introductory text to your project, you note a distinction between postmodernism, based on a linear vision of time, and altermodernism, whose model would be the labyrinth.
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘This notion of the labyrinth echoes an anecdote from Claudio Magris’s Danube, which compares history to the idea of being in a train, riding the rails of time: a train comes toward us from the opposite direction, and for a few moments while runs along side us, we cannot tell if the train is going forward or backward. There are things that return; there are temporal loops. This notion is also very present in Borges, who describes time as a garden whose paths are forever forking. We’re not in the presence of a linear vision of time, but more of a sort of labyrinth. Postmodernism is the period where we didn’t know what to do with this labyrinth. I have the sense that today, wandering through the labyrinth has a positive value. This wandering seems to be the altermodern gesture par excellence: to finally find not what you’re looking for, but something else.’
Christophe Gallois:
The term ‘altermodern’ inscribes itself in the continuity of the notions of modernism and postmodernism that have defined the twentieth century, often to the greatest confusion. Recently, many have called into doubt the pertinence of these two notions. I’m thinking, for example, of Jacques Rancière, who questions the traditionally accepted trajectory of modernism to postmodernism. Modernism, according to him, was merely a way to simplify what he calls the ‘modern disorder’, while postmodernism failed by marking an artificial temporary rupture. Where do you situate yourself in this debate?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I would put myself more in the wake of Bruno Latour, when he says that we were never modern, at least in epistemological terms. We are still yet to arrive at a real relativism, which would no longer be indexed on a dominant culture, while ceasing to float in the postmodern “anything goes.” The relativism proposed by postmodernism is based on a sort of freezing of time. This was a period of resetting, equalizing and homogenizing different cultural hierarchies. How does one proceed, if not by re-ranking things through a new division, this time between altermodern and postmodern?’
Christophe Gallois:
An important aspect of your project is the reconsideration of multiculturalism. Taking a step back from the multiplication of cultural specificities and the accumulation of identities, you detect a more precise interest in contemporary practices for the formulation of what Edouard Glissant defined as processes of creolization, based on the association of different cultures, on the dynamics of translation, appropriation, and so on.
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘I think that we are arriving at a historical moment where artists no longer start with their specific culture, but with a culture that is already globalized. The work is more about starting from this globalized culture and arriving at the specifics than working from one’s identity or origins, which leads the artist to become the logo for his or her own culture. Many artists, whose work doesn’t interest me very much, are content to simply present their culture, their roots or their identity as content in itself. I think that the attitude that consists in presenting oneself as above all “different” no longer works. Difference is something that has to arise; it can’t declare itself.’
Christophe Gallois:
Could you say a bit about the curatorial directions that you took for the Tate Triennial? What, according to you, are the type of artistic practices and exhibition formats that correspond to the ideas you are developing?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘An exhibition is a question asked, never the answers that one brings to it. The exhibition Altermodern is the product of a series of meetings and discussions with artists and different art professionals. Since I’m currently based in London, I started with the uniqueness of London as a global city, a city where people from all over the world pass through for longer or shorter stays.The exhibition is also characterized by a certain generational homogeneity in the choice of artists, a little like Traffic, the exhibition I made around relational aesthetics in 1996 in Bordeaux. One exception is the participation of Gustav Metzger, who I wanted to include in the project as an epigraph, in the sense that, in the context of Modernism in the 60s, he is the great thinker of ecological catastrophe and sustainable development, two notions with very strong echoes in the new generation of artist. Finally, there are common inquiries that emerged in the relationships between the works, almost after the fact: there is, for instance, a propensity to manipulate signs coming from very different horizons, and a broad use of black and white.’
Christophe Gallois:
The exhibition will also coincide with the publication of your new book. Could you say a few words about it?
Nicolas Bourriaud:
‘The book is called The Radicant. It’s somewhat like the theoretical log of this exhibition. In most dictionaries, the term “radicant” comes right after “radical.” “Radicant” is the opposite of “radical,” meaning what belongs to the root; “radicant” means an organism that takes root as it moves along the ground. This image perfectly illustrates the modernity that I see emerging. We are no longer dealing with the concept of the tabula rasa. The modernity that is coming is based on this globalized state of the imagination, on the individual’s ability to exist not in a form of being but in permanent becoming, on the artist’s capacity to invent forms that aren’t indexed on an identity but on displacement, on the permanent rotation of signs and on the formation of paths within a quasi-infinite landscape of signs and available forms, on a planetary scale.’
Altermodern, Tate Triennial 2009
TATE Britain
3 februari t/m 26 april
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, Sternberg Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-933128-42-9
An Archipelago of Local Responses Nicolas Bourriaud on the Altermodern
We were given this article to read for the upcoming workshop
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Sunday afternoon
Friday morning Noise
Relief, Anxiety Anticipation
Confrontation, Confrontation Stomach punch
Tone\/Intention, sourpuss
Frustration, Panic and the eventual meltdown
Lapis Lazuli, Throat Chakra, Speaking expensive
Listening, Hearing, Planning, Following through
Suspension, Out of context, Audience, Applause
Fragility, Fragility, Fragility, Ego - ego, ego
The Absurd, Letting go, Iron marks in linen
Unfinished, Run laps, Stop, Pause, Gap, continue
Harried, redirect Harried, exhausted
Relinquish
Relief, Anxiety Anticipation
Confrontation, Confrontation Stomach punch
Tone\/Intention, sourpuss
Frustration, Panic and the eventual meltdown
Lapis Lazuli, Throat Chakra, Speaking expensive
Listening, Hearing, Planning, Following through
Suspension, Out of context, Audience, Applause
Fragility, Fragility, Fragility, Ego - ego, ego
The Absurd, Letting go, Iron marks in linen
Unfinished, Run laps, Stop, Pause, Gap, continue
Harried, redirect Harried, exhausted
Relinquish
Friday, May 8, 2009
Friday Theoractical
Friday morning
Relief, Anxiety
Confrontation, Confrontation
Tone\/Intention
Frustration, Panic
Lapis Lazuli, Throat Chakra, Speaking
Listening, Hearing
Suspension, Out of context
Fragility, Fragility, Fragility, Ego
The Absurd, Letting go
Unfinished, Stop, Pause, Gap
Harried, redirect Harried
Relief, Anxiety
Confrontation, Confrontation
Tone\/Intention
Frustration, Panic
Lapis Lazuli, Throat Chakra, Speaking
Listening, Hearing
Suspension, Out of context
Fragility, Fragility, Fragility, Ego
The Absurd, Letting go
Unfinished, Stop, Pause, Gap
Harried, redirect Harried
Friday morning
Relief
Confrontation
Tone/Intention
Frustration
Lapis Lazuli
Suspension
Fragility
The Absurd
Unfinished
Harried
Confrontation
Tone/Intention
Frustration
Lapis Lazuli
Suspension
Fragility
The Absurd
Unfinished
Harried
"I really miss her"
from a film Ali is paraphrasing...
from the sadness of me being away...
from me missing her
from the sadness of me being away...
from me missing her
Monday, May 4, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
we may everyday
list in preparation of leaving Ali (particularities/specific care)- the everyday
hold her in the night while she pees (she sleeps on the shoulder)
carry her to bed
hold hand as we fall asleep
if she coughs in the night hold her close and position her body on the side
wipe morning pee
direct her to underwear and sleeping beauty dress
if dress needs cleaning she likes to clean it in the morning bubble bath
offer fruit, cereal, bread with cream cheese- in this order
dress for school, give some choices in wardrobe
prepare school bag with Arnold (stuffed pig toy) inside
give two vitamins before school
brush teeth
prepare carrot juice mixture with extra vitamin C
buckle in car seat- kiss, "have a good day, sunshine."
pick up, bring apple for the ride
in the car ride ask questions about school- what songs they sang, what snack they had, etc.
have cuddle time when you get in the door (involves kisses, tickles)
prepare various fruit, vegetables, soup and crackers for lunch
outdoor time (if weather permits)
reading time (naked time- skin to skin) read books cuddling in bed
hold child while she poops (supporting the back)
wipe, wash both sets of hands
dinner
put on pj's all together
cartoon
brush teeth
tuck into bed, kiss cheeks, forehead, nose, "good night, sunshine"
repeat
hold her in the night while she pees (she sleeps on the shoulder)
carry her to bed
hold hand as we fall asleep
if she coughs in the night hold her close and position her body on the side
wipe morning pee
direct her to underwear and sleeping beauty dress
if dress needs cleaning she likes to clean it in the morning bubble bath
offer fruit, cereal, bread with cream cheese- in this order
dress for school, give some choices in wardrobe
prepare school bag with Arnold (stuffed pig toy) inside
give two vitamins before school
brush teeth
prepare carrot juice mixture with extra vitamin C
buckle in car seat- kiss, "have a good day, sunshine."
pick up, bring apple for the ride
in the car ride ask questions about school- what songs they sang, what snack they had, etc.
have cuddle time when you get in the door (involves kisses, tickles)
prepare various fruit, vegetables, soup and crackers for lunch
outdoor time (if weather permits)
reading time (naked time- skin to skin) read books cuddling in bed
hold child while she poops (supporting the back)
wipe, wash both sets of hands
dinner
put on pj's all together
cartoon
brush teeth
tuck into bed, kiss cheeks, forehead, nose, "good night, sunshine"
repeat
Monday, April 27, 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009
reading these lines as I read your last message
"The soul is the seedbed of our actions. Everything that we conceptualize, create, or destroy has its beginnings there. What we see cultivated and thriving in the outer terrain is a manifestation of our inner creative or destructive impulses. There is a connectedness between what we see in the world and who we are, between who we are and what we do."
Estella Conwill Majozo, To Search for the Good and Make it Matter
Estella Conwill Majozo, To Search for the Good and Make it Matter
Friday, April 24, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Another Day, 2
notice bird on a wire parrot next door
smell my sweat twine and dinner from last night
talk to mother talk to mother talk to mother
wash dishes listen for washer
blend breakfast shake remember vitamins
dress decide, same clothes for three years
fold laundry lint out of dryer
take project photos finish intervention
pick up daughter
run to post office stamps, deadlines, applications due
make lunch irritated
tidy up tidy up tidy up tidy up
write grocery list, to do list, mental list, art list
vacuum and sweep - everyone's allergic to spring
read to daughter read to myself - pick up the book, already
shop for groceries make sure enough money is in account
teach drawing lesson remember how to draw
cook dinner list list list
propose consider ponder
post follow through
read exhaustion stress
repeat
smell my sweat twine and dinner from last night
talk to mother talk to mother talk to mother
wash dishes listen for washer
blend breakfast shake remember vitamins
dress decide, same clothes for three years
fold laundry lint out of dryer
take project photos finish intervention
pick up daughter
run to post office stamps, deadlines, applications due
make lunch irritated
tidy up tidy up tidy up tidy up
write grocery list, to do list, mental list, art list
vacuum and sweep - everyone's allergic to spring
read to daughter read to myself - pick up the book, already
shop for groceries make sure enough money is in account
teach drawing lesson remember how to draw
cook dinner list list list
propose consider ponder
post follow through
read exhaustion stress
repeat
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
another everyday
notice bird on a wire
smell my sweat
talk to mother
wash dishes
blend breakfast shake
dress
fold laundry
take project photos
pick up daughter
run to post office
make lunch
tidy up
write grocery list
vacuum
read to daughter
shop for groceries
teach drawing lesson
cook dinner
propose
post
read
smell my sweat
talk to mother
wash dishes
blend breakfast shake
dress
fold laundry
take project photos
pick up daughter
run to post office
make lunch
tidy up
write grocery list
vacuum
read to daughter
shop for groceries
teach drawing lesson
cook dinner
propose
post
read
Preliminary Project Proposal
Project Proposal:
I propose a site-specific sculpture, a bronze easel, to be placed within the landscape of Redmond for the Redmond Outdoor Park Exhibition. The easel itself is to be part cast bronze as well as bronze piping, designed and welded by me with the help of Seattle welder, Jerry Sustek, and cast with help of Olympic Foundry.
The artwork is a sculpture and a performance as it will be fully adjustable by the viewer/participant. It is a space in which to engage as well as a tool to support the art community within Redmond. A plaque will accompany the sculpture inviting viewer participation stating; “Turn this easel to a desired location. Look. Create.” There is a possibility for landscape classes to accompany the piece over its two-year duration.
It is time for public sculpture to speak not just of the beauty within itself but and perhaps more importantly to the beauty surrounding it, our environment, out of which it is born.
I propose a site-specific sculpture, a bronze easel, to be placed within the landscape of Redmond for the Redmond Outdoor Park Exhibition. The easel itself is to be part cast bronze as well as bronze piping, designed and welded by me with the help of Seattle welder, Jerry Sustek, and cast with help of Olympic Foundry.
The artwork is a sculpture and a performance as it will be fully adjustable by the viewer/participant. It is a space in which to engage as well as a tool to support the art community within Redmond. A plaque will accompany the sculpture inviting viewer participation stating; “Turn this easel to a desired location. Look. Create.” There is a possibility for landscape classes to accompany the piece over its two-year duration.
It is time for public sculpture to speak not just of the beauty within itself but and perhaps more importantly to the beauty surrounding it, our environment, out of which it is born.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Bronze Easel
Directory of ImagesRedmond Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition
Where the Beauty of the Art Reflects the Beauty of the Landscape, which is Redmond
Tereza Swanda
*Note that finished easel will be fabricated in bronze
1. Easel at Westside Park
2. Easel at Sammamish Trail
3. Easel at Sammamish Trail
4. Easel at Marymoore Park
Requirements and Directions for Installation
A plaque must accompany the piece explaining to all the function of the piece; to look at, and participate in appreciating the beauty of Redmond through painting, drawing and observing this landscape. (Instead of looking at the artwork I want to shift the viewer’s/participant’s perspective, to the beauty of this land.)
The easel will come with a concrete base as well as an axle in order to rotate the piece for the desired view.
A round circumference measuring the same, as the concrete base needs to be dug up in order for the base and ground to be at the same level. (view drawings)
All edges will be sanded for safety.
The easel will be functional and available to all in the community.
Periodic lubrication of parts might be required as the piece gets more wear over the years.
A plaque must accompany the piece explaining to all the function of the piece; to look at, and participate in appreciating the beauty of Redmond through painting, drawing and observing this landscape. (Instead of looking at the artwork I want to shift the viewer’s/participant’s perspective, to the beauty of this land.)
The easel will come with a concrete base as well as an axle in order to rotate the piece for the desired view.
A round circumference measuring the same, as the concrete base needs to be dug up in order for the base and ground to be at the same level. (view drawings)
All edges will be sanded for safety.
The easel will be functional and available to all in the community.
Periodic lubrication of parts might be required as the piece gets more wear over the years.
(Still need to work out details, call foundries, collaborate with plumbers, construction workers for the concrete base, etc.)
Friday, April 17, 2009
Friday
I've been withdrawn in the self- or more specifically self-pity. Received a poor evaluation on my last batch of writing. It's amazing how paralyzing a couple of words can be. Doubting everything-writing, the professor, dialogue, the program, the silly paper at the end of forty thousand dollars... myself.
Need to move, to dance
I feel like I need to begin anew.
Need to move, to dance
I feel like I need to begin anew.
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